Horses use their ears to communicate with stablemates

We already know that body language is important for people, but now it turns out that horses can also pick up on visual clues.

They pay attention to each others’ ears to work out just what’s going on in their stablemate’s head.

To find out which visual clues horses responded to, mammal communication experts Jennifer Wathan and Professor Karen McComb, from the University of Sussex, set up an experiment where horses had to choose where to feed.

(Joe Lamberti/AP/PA)

Each horse was individually led to a point where it was released and allowed to choose between two buckets. On a wall behind the buckets was a life-sized photograph of a horse’s head facing either to left or right.

The researchers found that if either the ears or the eyes of the horse in the picture were obscured, the horse being led made a random choice between the two buckets. However, if the ears and eyes were visible, then the horse used these directional cues to guide their choice.

(Current Biology, Wathan et al. 2014)

Turns out the position of the picture horse’s eyes and ears was crucial.

Writing in Current Biology, Wathan said: “Previous work investigating communication of attention has focused on cues that humans use – body orientation, head orientation and eye gaze. But no one had gone beyond that.

“We found that in horses, their ear position was also a crucial visual signal. In fact, horses needed to see the detailed facial features of both eyes and ears before they would use another horse’s head direction to guide their choice.

“Most people who live and work alongside animals with mobile ears would agree that the ears are important in communication, but it has taken science a while to catch up. We naturally have a human-centric view of the world and as we can’t move our ears they get rather overlooked in other species.”

(Clay Jackson/AP/PA)

McComb added: “This study emphasises that animals other than primates are aware of subtle differences in facial expression and can use these to guide the decisions that they make. Fine scaled facial movements can indicate important changes in attention and emotional state and are likely to be crucial in determining social behaviour in a wide range of animals.”