“What’s with the long face?”: a new study looks at horses and how we can recognize their pain

For the first time, a new study has examined the effectiveness of humans in determining whether we can recognise pain in horses, just by looking at their faces. 

Scientists at Bournemouth University (BU) conducted a study where a group of people, some with experience of horse-care and others with no horse experience were shown pictures of humans’ and horses’ faces and asked if they could tell whether the horse or human was in pain or not. Their responses were compared with those of ten equine behaviour experts. 

Overall, the accuracy of pain recognition was higher for those studying human faces than horse faces. But participants with horse-care experience were more accurate at pain recognition in horse faces, with the accuracy increasing with the more experience they had. 

Nicola J. Gregory, Principal Academic in Psychology who led the study said:  

“Humans depend on horses as work animals and are used in leisure and sport across the world. But the extent to which we can recognise pain in horses has never been studied. We showed that people are generally very poor at seeing pain in horses, but people who have a lot of horse experience were a great deal better at recognising these subtle signs of pain.” 

The study also looked at how experiences of social anxiety influenced people’s ability to see pain in horses and human faces. Nicola continued: “We weren’t surprised that pain was easier to recognise in human faces, as we are exposed to these much more than animals. But a very interesting finding was that people who were more socially anxious were more accurate at recognising pain in the human faces but also saw more pain in the horses faces even when it wasn’t there.  

It is hoped that the findings of this study will help build up a picture of which factors are important in recognising emotions in horses so that better support  can be given to owners to help them notice changes which might indicate when an animal is in pain, and improve the welfare of these animals. 

The study has been published in the journal Anthrozoos.