Horses Forgive but Rarely Forget
The DiscoveryNews article, “Horses Never Forget Human Friends” states that horses remember and remain loyal to humans that have treated them well in the past. In addition, horses understanding vocal cues better than we previously assumed. Carols Sankey, an ethologist at the University of Rennes in France, developed an experiment to test if the horse would remember the trainer and training it received as much as eight months later.
The study consisted of 20 Anglo-Arabian and 3 French Saddlebred horses. The horses were trained in 41 different tasks associated with grooming and medical care. The horses that were given treats as rewards for good behavior were more likely to remember and gravitate towards the trainer. In addition, the horses trained with positive reinforcement would be more friendly and social with humans, which could be due to their positive association with humans in general. On the other hand, the horses trained without positive reinforcement were four to six times more likely to engage in negative behavior like biting and kicking. In other words, horses learn better from positive reinforcement.
Another interesting finding was that horses also respond well to command associated with certain behaviors such as “trot” because their hearing it very good at the frequency in which we talk.
This article supports the saying, “you get more with sugar than vinegar”. Horses, like humans, want to be rewarded for completing a task correctly. If they are not rewarded they will make this fact well know by reacting with bad behavior. My question is, how long can a horse remember someone? Does it last more than a year or five years?
Discovery News Article
http://news.discovery.com/animals/horse-friends-memory-trainers.html
Paper by Carol Sankey
http://apps.webofknowledge.com/full_record.do?product=WOS&search_mode=GeneralSearch&qid=9&SID=2DB9oAbLmdH7Eg3anDL&page=1&doc=5
Posted by: Caroline Adams (1)
This is a very interesting post, I wonder if any other species that humans train behave in a similar manor. One of my best friends has a horse and he definitely recognizes her voice. When she walked into a pasture and simply called his name he came running over for her without even seeing her. When she would leave for college he started to miss seeing her every day! I think horses remember people who spend significant amounts of time with them, especially owners. This reminds me of the movie Black Beauty where the horse remembers the boy from when he was young and recognizes him later in life. I wonder if there are any stories from real life where someone owns a horse for awhile and comes back later in life and the horse stills recognizes them. It would be an interesting experiment to do although it would take a lot of time.
ReplyDeletePosted by Caitlin Descovich O'Hare
This post is very interesting. The horse tended to respond to his trainer more, since he is comfortable with him, but I wonder if his trainer wasn't around, would he still listen to the commands of other voices? Also, it is very interesting that the horse has the ability to notice that when he is not treated with something for completing a task right, they get angry. I wonder if they would only get angry at their own trainer, like a child throws fits with their parents often, compared to how they act to less comfortable people such as teachers. Horses are much smarter than I previously believed!
ReplyDeletePosted by Abbie Saranteas
I wonder if there was some other reason for the bad reaction from some of the horses: such as maybe they were treated poorly, instead of just a lack of positive reinforcement in the training process. It seems strange that merely a lack of positive reinforcement would result in behavior such as biting and kicking.
ReplyDeleteIt would be very interesting to see how long a horse could remember someone; maybe if it is a person who treated the horse well (with positive reinforcement) maybe a horse would remember that person for its whole life.
Posted by Johanna Brophy
After reading this article I had a similar question to Johanna's. My question is in regards to memorization tied to negative stimuli, not to be cruel, instead of positive or none at all. Say the horses were scolded when they did something incorrectly would they remember it just the same as if they were given a treat for doing it correctly? Is memory tied more to reward rather than relief?
ReplyDeletePosted by Michael Thomas