Can horses detect fear? Horse sense, human sense

I’m interested in that special horse-human communication and most horse owners will tell you the same: they know what their horse is thinking! They can read their horses to an extent. They know whether the horse is feeling a bit grumpy, the horse is a bit more excited, the horse is happy or relaxed or excited.

In my experience, horse owners can see that easily. My question is then, can horses also detect what we are feeling or thinking? Most horse owners will tell you, yes, they can. But I was interested in the science behind this. Is there any proof that horses can sense what we are feeling, and in particular, can they sense fear?

If they can sense fear, does it then make them fearful or are they stoic enough to continue on their own emotional state? Or are they influenced in some way. Most people will tell you anecdotally that horses are influenced by a nervous rider. They are influenced when our own fear sets in, that they start to tighten up, that they start to wonder what the danger is.

But is this really true? Is it a myth? Is it pseudoscience? Is it completely anecdotal? Does it depend on the horse? Let’s find out.

Do people smell horses’ fear?

For the next research paper, the question posed was can humans detect whether or not horses are fearful? Well, in this case, although the study was limited in numbers, it probably needs repeating with different cases and different people and different horses.

Examining the preliminary results, they seem to suggest that humans can detect those fear chemicals put out into the sweat of horses. However, this study, from the University of Warsaw, took sweat on pads from thoroughbreds in fearful situations and in more relaxed situations.

The slight flaw in the study was that when the horses were fearful, they were sweating more. This meant that the human volunteers were able to see that those sweat pads did contain more sweat. Were the humans responding to the smell alone or the fact that they could see that there was more sweat produced? Did the humans respond to automatic visual cues – subconsciously?

If we assume that the Warsaw study gave insight into interplay between horse and rider, or horse and horse owner constantly, it’s happening on a very, unconscious level that we can detect changes not only in body language, but olfactorially too. 

And that leads me on to ask the question, which member of the partnership? Who initiates the pheromone secretion?

Or, could it even be simultaneous depending on the situation? 

This interplay appear to be without conscious awareness, we’re simply producing olfactory chemicals and we don’t know about them. Can both horsew and rider smell fear?

A study from the University of Guelph in Canada had horses in a round pen and they sent a human volunteer into the round pen. They didn’t need to do anything. The human volunteer simply stood there. 

The humans were blindfolded; they were organised into 2 categories: nervous of horses and confident around horses. 

The researchers could see what was happening in terms of the horse behaviour and also to be able to monitor the cardiac rates of the human and the horses. When the person went in with the fear, the horses moved much more slowly. They carried their heads more towards the ground and their heart rates didn’t increase appreciably. 

The horses were in a curious state and the researchers even labelled it as a certain level of sympathy.  Obviously in that situation, you’ve got a group of horses and one fearful human, and the horses know one another, they are in a. herd and you’ve got one scared human. It’s quite different to the one-to-one relationship of a horse and a rider. But it’s still really fascinating that in a group, they exhibited more sympathy than fear, even thought the human had initiated a fear response.

In that case, the human really didn’t have a lot of bearing on the horses feelings. They were, were quite warm towards the human. 

The next study that I looked at was from the University of Tours in France, but something very similar was done at the University of Sussex as well. Now, this latter study looked at visual cues, whereas the French team also looked at auditory cues.

If people approach with the stresses of the day, can a horse detect it?

The question was, can horses recognise human emotions by visual or auditory means?

The researchers tested horses with animated pictures of human facial expressions. One was joy and the other one was anger. Additionally, the French team had a matching vocalisation (non-word sound) played at the same time. 

They monitored the behaviour of the horses and their heart rate changes. And what they found was that there was a definite vigilant posture for the anger. For the joy, they adopted a much more relaxed posture. Now what happened when they had the picture and they played the opposite sound?

This time, the horses looked curious. If a horse can look puzzled, then they look puzzled. They recognised that this was a mismatch, they knew that they were being fooled! 

The researchers at Sussex noticed that when they did a very similar experiment, horses detecting anger tended to look more with their left eyes, and that suggested that they were engaging the part of the brain where the fear stimuli are processed, in the right-hand side of the brain.

In conclusion, horses can detect emotions in humans and they can detect different emotions and that we can also detect our horse’s emotions. It will be interesting to see in future studies whether a calm person can calm a horse and vice versa. If you’d like to find out more about becoming a calmer rider or calmer around horses, why not give my podcast a listen or browse my website for sessions, freebies and my newsletter. You can also use the contact form below to get in touch.