Horses have reasoning skills appropriate to their species and they have sensory perception way in advance of humans. They can hear and smell things we canāt, and can also feel electrical force fields we canāt. They can see further away than humans but donāt have as good binocular vision. Like all sentient beings, horses use sensory input as data for their reasoning process.
So a horse may be able to smell that a bear was here an hour ago, or hear microtears in the trees in windy weather, or see horses a mile away across the river or know there is a storm blowing in or feel a force field around a transformer box or catch the feelings of another horse in the arena who is angry and desperate. Then they make rational choices that seem irrational to us because we donāt have the same data.
I am always bemused when animal intelligence is measured using human scales, like understanding spoken language or solving mechanical problems. These are fun things that some horses do learn if they are extraverted and social. But they are not core to Being A Horse.
Add to that, we spend a lot of time discouraging horses from fiddling with infrastructure. We donāt want them pawing, chewing, opening gates, opening doors etc. after a lifetime of being in environments that are deliberately made horse proof why would we expect a horse to quickly figure out that this particular feeder can be operated by them? Only the annoying nosy fiddly horses will figure this out (mine would). The horses who have properly learned over time not to be fiddly and annoying are less likely to try.
I also shake my head when people say animal has āthe intelligence of a 2 year old human childā or 5 year old or whatever. Based on how much spoken vocabulary they respond to
No they donāt. There is no comparison. Put most healthy adult horses loose on a field or even open range and they will exhibit the full range of adult horse intelligence including social and emotional intelligence in the herd, problem solving for food and water, and staying safe from weather and threats.
Put a 5 year old child loose in any environment without adult help and they will die. Even if they can speak in complete sentences and even read a little. Or solve simple construction block problems.
Horses have an intelligence that is more āotherā to us than dogs are, and the first step in training them or in studying behavior is to understand and relate to that intelligence as much as you can. Good trainers have internalized this, or rather I should say good horsemen, which is a more comprehensive and rarer category than just training.
I understand that itās difficult to set up quantitative experiments on intelligence that arenāt based on ludicrously anthropomorphic standards, but the conclusions drawn from this are misleading and take us farther away from knowing and feeling how horses think, percieved and reason.
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