Give the Horse its Due

Just how intelligent are horses anyway? Well, they are not as intelligent as humans which are blessed with a complex frontal cortex that allow them to worry about such things as how the tax rate on the rich will affect their future employment opportunities. Horses, on the other hand, don't have such worries. Indeed, horses don't think about much more than the here and now, as their lack of a developed frontal cortex makes them incapable of planning ahead or cheating on their taxes. This is not to say, however, that horses are not without intelligence.

People often compare the intelligence of horses unfavorably to that of cats and dogs. This is an unfair comparison. Cats and dogs are predatory animals that have instincts developed to find, attack, and eat prey. They are aggressive by nature. Horses are prey animals, react or be eaten has been their evolutionary path – there is no fight or flight conundrum – just run. This instinctive characteristic, however, does not preclude the horse from having cognitive capabilities, as research is showing in spades.

Historically, mankind has viewed the horse as a dumb animal. Recent research, however, has shed new light on equine intelligence. It is clear that horses are capable of not only dealing with daily tasks but mental ones as well. In the wild, horses must learn the challenges brought upon by predators, or that of a changing environment. They must learn and contend with new surroundings.

Indeed, domestication has likely led to even greater mental challenges for horses, as the demands of stable living are counter to the instincts developed over the 4 million years the horse with which mankind is familiar has been around. Horses exhibit habituation, the ability to become accustomed to stimulation such as daily interactions in the stable and to “block it out” as necessary (no mean feat for a flight first response animal). Also they exhibit Pavlovian responses (yes, just like the dogs) to stimuli that indicate the arrival of food or other positive outcomes. Finally, they are capable of operant conditioning - that is behavioral learning through consequence training – which is the means that humans learn to do such things as pay taxes.

So, although Secretariat did not understand the implications of winning the Triple Crown, he knew enough to adapt, learn and selectively apply his instincts to his environment to provide a comfortable long life at stud. Smart indeed.