Recognizing faces is not that hard when you see the same face for a long time. Surprisingly, this ability is not unique to humans. There are animals, like birds and monkeys, which are also capable of doing this, even from just a collection of photographs. But what of domesticated animals, like horses, that humans have tamed for thousands of years?
Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.
She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side images by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their current keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored the stranger’s face about 75 percent of the time, significantly better than chance.
What’s even more surprising is that these same horses also recognize their previous owners that they haven’t seen for about half a year. These findings suggest two things: that horses can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces, and they recognize photographs as just representations of real life.
And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal companion: the domestic dog.
But how will horses react when they are shown faces of people that they have had a bad experience with? That’s what researchers would like to find out in the near future.
(Image Credit: Chiemsee2016/ Pixabay)