Elsevier

Applied Animal Behaviour Science

Volume 184, November 2016, Pages 66-73
Applied Animal Behaviour Science

Horses can learn to use symbols to communicate their preferences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2016.07.014Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Horses can learn to use symbols boards for communication with humans.

  • Horses could tell if they wanted a blanket put on or taken off, or stay unchanged.

  • Speed of learning varied.

  • All horses performed well within 2 weeks of training.

  • Training was successful for 23/23 horses of various age and breeds.

Abstract

This paper describes a method in which horses learn to communicate by touching different neutral visual symbols, in order to tell the handler whether they want to have a blanket on or not. Horses were trained for 10–15 min per day, following a training program comprising ten steps in a strategic order. Reward based operant conditioning was used to teach horses to approach and touch a board, and to understand the meaning of three different symbols. Heat and cold challenges were performed to help learning and to check level of understanding. At certain stages, a learning criterion of correct responses for 8–14 successive trials had to be achieved before proceeding. After introducing the free choice situation, on average at training day 11, the horse could choose between a “no change” symbol and the symbol for either “blanket on” or “blanket off” depending on whether the horse already wore a blanket or not. A cut off point for performance or non-performance was set to day 14, and 23/23 horses successfully learned the task within this limit. Horses of warm-blood type needed fewer training days to reach criterion than cold-bloods (P < 0.05). Horses were then tested under differing weather conditions. Results show that choices made, i.e. the symbol touched, was not random but dependent on weather. Horses chose to stay without a blanket in nice weather, and they chose to have a blanket on when the weather was wet, windy and cold (χ2 = 36.67, P < 0.005). This indicates that horses both had an understanding of the consequence of their choice on own thermal comfort, and that they successfully had learned to communicate their preference by using the symbols. The method represents a novel tool for studying preferences in horses.

Keywords

Operant conditioning
Blanket
Rug
Thermoregulation
Cognition
Clicker training

Cited by (0)