Horses Are Smarter Than We Realized
How smart are horses? This article delves into a recent scientific study that reveals horses are far more cognitively advanced than we've given them credit for. Discover how an experiment showed that horses can think and plan ahead—a skill previously thought to be beyond their capacity.
Article Summary
This article dissects a fascinating recent study on equine intelligence that challenges our assumptions about how we test and understand other species. Researchers initially thought the horses in their experiment were failing, but a clever change revealed the truth: the horses understood the rules all along but were playing a different game.
Discover how this study proves that horses have the ability to form an internal model of the world to make decisions and predictions. The full text explores why we so often get it wrong, how a prey animal's priorities differ from ours, and the profound implications this has for how we train, handle, and learn from these incredibly intelligent beings.
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Horses Are A Lot Smarter Than We Previously Thought, New Research Shows
I hate that title. Probably because I keep seeing the same title, and many of us go ‘duh’ yes, we knew that. And you still don’t know the half of it.
I already knew that horses were incredibly smart and sorry that for others it is taking you so long to catch up. I have seen this title before.
We’ve all seen a similar title before. And we will see again. Because each time the researchers have yet to come to a true understanding of how smart these creatures are . True of me for a long time. Taught to believe as most of us were that horses were not that smart with a very small brain.
And why is it important to understand that what we were told was wrong?
Because in so many different ways it influenced how we trained, what equipment we used, how we interacted with our horses and why it was okay to use whips, spurs and pain to control them. Just dumb beasts, after all.
But while sad with the title this study had some interesting elements.
One that spoke to how we keep making the mistake of assuming our tests should show certain results and then based on these results we make our declarations of how smart or dumb these animals are. If the researchers had halted at a certain point in this experiment, they would have assumed wrongly how dumb horses are. Then they would have published a very different paper telling us this proved just how dumb horses are.
Dr. Carrie Ijichi, a senior lecturer in equine science at NTU: “Horses are not natural geniuses, they are thought of as mediocre, but this study shows they’re not average and are, in fact, more cognitively advanced than we give them credit for.”
So what was this experiment?
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