This Douglas Lees photograph captures the huntsman’s horse expressing himself most clearly!
A horse walks into a bar.
“Why the long face?” asks the bartender.
Scientists at the University of Sussex must have heard that old joke and taken it seriously. They have discovered that horses are able to employ seventeen distinct facial expressions—three more than chimpanzees and one more than dogs. Humans, by way of comparison, are able to communicate their most subtle feelings by twenty-seven different facial expressions through our exceedingly dexterous facial musculature.
Jennifer Watham, a lead author of the paper, and her colleagues dissected a horse’s head and studied all the muscles, especially around the eye, that allow the horse to communicate emotions.
“What surprised us was the rich repertoire of complex facial movements in horses, and how many of them are similar to humans,” said Watham. “Horses and humans can both raise the skin above their eyes, which seems to happen in negative emotional states. Another example is the retraction of lip corners, which seems to be part of a submissive gesture in horses.”
The researchers recorded fifteen hours of behavior in eighty-six horses—all ages, both sexes, and a variety of breeds—to correlate muscle movement across the sample.
“Horses are social animals,” said Watham. “Most of their behaviour must have evolved to help keep family groups together during seasonal migration in search of changing food sources, and to warn of possible predator attack.”
Watham and her team worked with collaborators from the University of Portsmouth and Duquesne University in Pennsylvania. The Sussex study, which has so far only catalogued eye, lip, nostril, chin, and other movements, is viewed as a jumping-off point for further study of how these seventeen expressions relate to emotional states.
Man and horse have a relationship stretching over thousands of years, and, though the expressions may be subtle, the researchers believe they are there to convey more meaning than was thought possible by horses. Click for more details by Tim Radford in The Guardian.
Posted December 26, 2018
Bartender joke contributed by Steve Price