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What do the looks of horses tell us? This is the question I asked myself when capturing these detailed photographs of the eyes of these animals, portrayed in Alt Urgell for La Vanguardia's Readers' Photos.
Human beings know how to interpret the emotions of other people or even animals with our ability to observe and process what we see. But, it turns out, horses, too.
They are able, with their gaze, to know if we are sad or happy, for example. If a horse sees an angry person's face, he will surely increase his heartbeat, turn his head, and return a defiant look at the human with his "bad" (left) eye. If, on the other hand, he recognizes a smile in that person, he will respond positively, allow himself to be caressed and continue looking straight ahead.
These are some of the conclusions reached by a team of five researchers from the University of Sussex, who published a study on the gaze of horses in the journal Biology Letters, which put horses at the same level as dogs. when it comes to recognizing human emotions.
According to the research, titled Functionally relevant responses to human facial expressions of emotion in the domestic horse (Equus caballus), that "non-human animals can recognize human signals, including emotions, has both scientific and applied importance, and is particularly relevant for domesticated species.
This study presented "the first evidence of the ability of horses to spontaneously discriminate between positive (happy) and negative (angry) human facial expressions in photographs."
The results showed that "angry faces induced responses indicative of a functional understanding of the stimuli: horses showed a gaze bias to the left (a lateralization generally associated with stimuli perceived as negative) and a more rapid increase in heart rate toward these photographs."
These lateralized responses to human emotions "had only been previously documented in dogs." In addition to the insights these findings provided about interspecific communication, they raised interesting questions about the generality and adaptability of emotional expression and perception across species, according to the researchers.
