Horses

**Fisherking** · 03-02-2009, 16:50

I have trouble with people who say horses are dumb animals.

Why, a horse can learn a trick and remember it after the first go round!

Try that with most dogs! Try that with some People!

People do spend years trying to train a horse to do a move just so, and I can’t help but think that the horses are just making fools of those people. (watch me make this guy mad when I do it this way)

Horses learn to open gates and doors. Will open stalls to let their buddies out to play. Open doors to get feed…how dumb it is that?

How many horses have been taught to bloat when a saddle girth is being tightened? Most of them do it though, don’t they?

Horses are a lot smarter than most of us give them credit for, and manage to outsmart most people at least some of the time.

What most people call bad habits, for a horse, are just little tricks they have learned to tick people off!
Others are from mistreatment or tack that hurts.

My horse knows when I am coming and usually sees me a long time before I can pick her out of the herd. Then she either chooses to come and see me, or go and make her self more difficult to catch. (never much more than walking off a few feet, but she lets me know just the same)

This is no small accomplishment as people are always changing colors. Horses don’t even see the same way people do and their far vision is mostly sensing movement, but some how she knows.

We don’t teach horses very much. Heck about all we do is convince them it is easier to let us get on their back and ride around than what ever other choices they can have. It is a lot more work to buck someone off than it is just to stand there. We don’t teach them how to go forward, they already knew that. The same with backing up, going sideways, and turning.

I get a kick out of people trying to fool a horse. What ever the trick, it only works once. If the horse chooses not to go along with it, it is the last time it is going to work. It is amazing how fast a horse can be gone when some one brings out that halter they were hiding…

I don’t try to fool my horse. My wife surprised her with a trick once and I am still trying to work that out.

I am afraid horses are like most people, they need to be shown and convinced that it is ok to do it…

I guess the one thing that can be said for horses not been all that smart is that they have anything to do with humans at all.

**Lemur** · 03-02-2009, 17:21

Some people, for whatever reason, find it hard to accept that animals have intelligence. It's not just horses who get the brunt of this. I watched some insane documentary about whether or not animals have thoughts and feelings, with several well-educated idiots making the argument that a zebra can't possibly feel fear or pleasure.

My best guess as to why people arrive at this counter-factual conclusion is that they are nervous about their own place in Creation, and feel a need to dis all other life-forms in order to reinforce their own specialness.

It also goes back to the great chain of being, a profoundly medieval mindset that lingers on no matter how counter-productive and useless it may be.

**Fragony** · 03-02-2009, 18:10

Had several horses in my life, and they are very smart animals. My full blooded english gave me a lot of airtime to the amusement of the spectators, I probably hold the dutch record for taking obstacles without a horse, and I have broken many a bone because of him, yep that was my favorite Murachi how I miss you. But I could put a small child on it and it would walk very very carefully. Awesome animal.

**Fisherking** · 03-02-2009, 19:28

I saw something some time back about the Munich Zoo’s program to reintroduce Tarpans and the Przewalski's Horses to the wild.

I don‘t recall all of the details but people from the zoo‘s breeding program visited a group of the animals a number of years after they were set free.

The animals would think of humans as not safe to approach in the area where they were, but these people were able to get close and some of the horses seemed to remember them and made contact.

Yet you read other supposed experts and they say their memories only last a few days.

Obviously these experts have spent minimal time studying the subjects of their expertise…