The body language of humans and horses.
In the Patrick Ness, Chaos Walking Trilogy, male humans and animals project their thoughts for everyone else to hear. In the books, the main male character Todd has a dog called Manchee, then later a horse called Angharrad. The horses never say much except Submit, Boy Colt, Girl Colt. Whilst we can’t understand what horses are thinking, we can understand horse’s body language and recent research suggests that horses understand our body language as well.
Research by the University of Essex found that horses can tell the difference between submissive and dominant body postures in humans, even when they don’t know the human.
In the dominant posture, the person stood up straight, arms and legs apart and chest expanded. In the submissive posture, they slouched, kept their arms and legs close to the body and relaxed their knees.
This will be very helpful for horse trainers and handlers, helping them to understand how horses perceive our body language.
Horses were given food rewards from people in a neutral body posture. They then conducted a second trial, where the person used either the submissive or dominant posture. The horses were more likely to approach individuals when they used the submissive posture.
Anecdotal evidence has suggested that horses are good at reading human body language, but this scientifically proves that they can.
In nature, including humans, larger postures suggest threat and dominance, whereas smaller postures suggest submissiveness. Horses may therefore understand this with humans as well.
Amy Smith, one of the co-authors also worked on a study last year and found that horses were able to distinguish between happy and angry human facial expressions.
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