07/10/2024
This is great! Too good not to share.
Horses can’t think like people and that’s okay.
They don’t have the brain anatomy to understand complex human concepts like respect and even if they did — respect as humans views it varies from culture to culture. They cannot possibly begin to understand respect as we define it and it’s unreasonable to expect them to do so.
They can’t willfully recall the past or look into the future like humans can. They do have excellent memories and can retain information but need certain stimuli to trigger previous memories rather than being able to freely recall the past or plot for events in the future. Since they are flight animals, living in the moment is much more advantageous to them.
Why must they need to have similar cognition to humans to be viewed as intelligent animals deserving of our respect?
Why can’t we appreciate them for the creatures they are and learn something from their level of presentness and sensitivity?
It is okay that they can’t think like us. It requires more adaptability on our part and asks us to leave aside the preconceived notions we carry in human society.
Humanizing horses enables us in our lack of desire to adapt for the sake of the horse but it’s damaging to the horses.
When we misrepresent their brain capacity and ability to understand human concepts, we cause harm by allowing people to rationalize high levels of punishment on the basis that the horse can understand how they’re “wronging” their human and is doing it intentionally.
So, we need to stop doing that because we are lying to ourselves to secure our own comfort at the expense of our horses.
The studies on equine brain anatomy and cognition tell us a very clear story.
Our horses’ capacity to learn from trial and error and be taught skills that us humans view to be “manners” or “respect” speaks for their ability to learn but we need to take ownership on our perception of horse behaviour and how it colours our view of them.
Human perception is not everything.
We can be wrong and are frequently.
Equine behavioural science helps to hold us more accountable by seeking to define what is the horses’ perception rather than allowing human bias to run the show. While bias can still exist, there’s more accountability in this than anecdotes.
Horses don’t think like us.
They shouldn’t have to.
