Why The Long Face? Horses Can Recognise Photos of Familiar People

Horses are already known to be able to recognise humans, but researchers have now demonstrated that they can recognise handlers from photographs, even when they haven't seen them for 6 months.

Welsh Mountain Ponies in the Brecon Beacons (credit: Poppy Simon)

Previous research has shown that horses can tell emotions from human faces, connect voices with faces and even learn faces from photographs and then identify the corresponding people in real life. Scientists didn't know, however, if they could do the opposite; that, is recognise photographs of humans they know in person, and also if they could remember faces long-term.

A team at the French Horse & Riding Institute showed that female horses preferentially chose the face of a keeper instead of a new face, and could even pick out the face of someone they hadn't seen for 6 months. It might seem obvious that a horse that can distinguish between humans could do the same from a photograph, but actually going from reality to a photo the horse can only use a fraction of the information it might know about a person - it can't use smell, voice, behaviour or movement. Dogs, for example, have real difficulties recognising faces in photographs, so the fact that horses can not only tell faces from photos, but recognise these faces 6 months later is really quite impressive.

Although this research sounds a bit like just a fun way to pass the time, the researchers point out that these advanced cognitive skills, particularly in terms of social interactions, do raise new ethical issues in terms of how humans interact with horses, as well as how we manage other livestock.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62940-w

Lansade, L., Colson, V., Parias, C.et al. Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously. Sci Rep 10, 6302 (2020)