Horses Are More Faithful and Bright to Man!

The man in one's life may have many friends. A study shows that if you are kind to your horses, horses can become the loyalist and longest friends.

This result published on the Animal Behavior Magazine.

Testing

An animal behaviorist Carroll Sankey and his colleagues of the University de Rennes in France took 20 Anglo-Arab horses and three French riding horses as the research objects to test their understanding and memory of orders from the horse trainer over a period of time.

The training program was carried out by a female horse trainer combined with basic course and medical care, including 41 steps. For example, when the horses hear the order of "Don't move", the horses must keep still. For another instance, when the horse trainer takes the temperature with a thermometer for them, they must coordinate with the horse trainer.

If the horses can perform these orders correctly, the horses would be rewarded with food by the horse trainer. After getting "delicious award", the horses would take a positive attitude over the horse trainer, for example smell and lick. These behaviors are not because they want to get more food from the horse trainer but because they are being nice to the horse trainer.

After the training program and the eight months of separation, when these horses saw the horse trainer once again, horses which were rewarded with food by the horse trainer take a positive attitude over the horse trainer and not resist another new horse trainer. This phenomenon suggests that they have been cultivated positive impression with human.

The research results show that in terms of positively hardly training and education, there is no difference between horses and human, which means in the positive atmosphere, their learning effect and memory effect are better. The researchers also wrote: "The negative behaviors by horses hardly untrained display fourfold to sextuple to horses hardly trained, such as bite, kick or fall on the researchers."

Researchers said that, the human languages which can be understood by horses are more than were expected. And what's more, their memories are very good. They can not only remember their human friends after a long time separation but also remember complex order steps for ten years and even more.

The US Discovery Channel quoted Sankey as saying: "The 'social relations' of horses can keep a long time and sometimes even all their life."

---