In recent months I have spoken with several horse trainers and owners, on the subject of the “intelligence” of horses, individually and as identified in specific breeds. I put the word intelligence in quotes because the first thing I concluded was that before we can even start discussing how smart a horse or breed may or may not be, we first have to make certain we are talking about the same thing we use the word intelligence.

Intelligence is a term describing one or more capacities of the mind. In different contexts, this can be defined in different ways, including the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving. I dismiss a few of these from the equine discussion out of hand and others I qualify the term as having a very different application when speaking of horses. For instance, I don’t believe horses are capable of abstract thought, understanding, reasoning, or planning beyond a very short chain of cause and effect; i.e. the horse is tired of standing and doing nothing, so he reaches over and nips the sleeve of your jacket to get you to react and thus relieves the boredom. They obviously have communication ability which is limited, for the most part, to body language. Their problem-solving ability and emotional intelligence are certainly subject of much debate and anecdotal evidence. However, it is most often in the areas of learning that we discuss the intelligence of the horse.

When we talk about learning, it is important to note that it is commonly accepted that horses learn in four general ways; Habituation, a form of non-associative learning, in which there is a decrease in psychological and behavioral response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to that stimulus for a duration of time. Desensitization, horses can be desensitized by getting them used to stimuli in small increments repeated over time. Pavlovian Conditioning,  where a horse becomes conditioned to give a particular response to a specific trigger. Operant Conditioning, where when a horse begins to learn the meaning of a new stimulus, it responds at first in an essentially random way but through trial and error, it will eventually offer the desired response. A trainer using both negative and positive reinforcement at the right moment encourages the horse to repeat the behavior.

These four learning methods are the cornerstones of horse training. All have their uses and none can be employed solely with any real success. Each trainer uses them differently, sometimes with wildly differing levels of efficacy. It is my belief that the reasons for the varied success levels have to do with the understanding or lack of understanding of the horse’s mental abilities.

The primary point of contention I have had with other trainers and horse owners has to do with a position I take; that in the training process, the horse is the innocent party and must therefore be held blameless when training or riding does not go as we intended. In other words, when things go wrong, it is our fault and not the horse’s. I even have a few “mantras” I call upon when I am training horses to keep me from letting frustration or embarrassment cause me to put the blame of failure on the animal instead of placing it where it belongs, on my own head. When I find myself getting frustrated or angry with a given horse/learning situation that isn’t going as planned, I repeat, mentally, something like “The horse is innocent. She is simply responding the only way she can.” Or ”1 + 1 will always equal 2. If you want a different answer, change the equation” Or, “You can not threaten a horse into being calm. You cannot scare it into being brave. Only in seeking harmony can gains be made.” And the ever-popular, “You are supposed the be the smarter of the two creatures here, you have to find the right path.” There are more, but I am sure you get the point.

The vast majority of people I speak with about this concept are willing to accept it up to a point, and then they balk. They invariably have several handy examples of things that have gone wrong that they insist are indeed the horse’s fault. We can all find examples of behavior that could be attributed to a horse being intentionally ill-behaved but I maintain that the horse is not mentally capable of conceiving an action with the intent of thwarting the trainer in their goal. All the horse instinctively seeks is safety and a sense of well-being. The horse is simply responding to stimuli and it was past human action or inaction that has taught the horse to respond this way to best secure its own well-being, even when the human is trying very hard to convince it that it is wrong. It may have been learned by a past handler, sometimes dating back many years, and certainly not the fault of the current trainer, but nor is it the fault of the horse. The horse does not “know” what you want, therefore it cannot be accused of intentionally misbehaving. It is just reacting the way it has been taught by previous miscommunication or perhaps even by a traumatic experience. In any case, the horse is responding only way it can, as it has never been correctly taught a different response. A horse responds first and foremost to its own evolved “hard wiring” and assuming the horse should “know” better is over-estimating the animal’s mental capacity.

One trainer, whom I much admire relayed to me a story of a horse she had once worked with. It seems this horse had been trained as a show horse, in both Western and English disciplines and had competed successfully for quite a while. One day, during the warm-up before an English class, another horse in the warm-up area threw a fit for some reason and in doing so, collided with the trainer’s horse. There was much excitement, a bit of cursing, and some tears. Afterward, they tried to take the horse into the class but it would simply not do what it was told and kept “misbehaving”. From that day on the horse kept “acting up” every time they tried to show English again, to the point that they simply stopped using the horse for this activity, however, she was always fine in the Western forms, so clearly the horse had chosen to just cause problems in the English class, after all, they are more similar than they are different.

Now what struck me most about this story was that while she was recounting this as an example of a horse that “knew” what was expected of it and was just not doing it and that there was nothing they could do about it, the cause for the problem was actually included right in the story. Now I am not claiming to know what this trainer was actually thinking when telling me this, it seemed odd to me at the time that she should not come to the same conclusion that I had snapped to. This horse had its previous training overridden by a traumatic event and it just replaced one trained response for another. No matter what the horse used to “know” about riding in an English show class, or how similar it was to Western, this had been superseded another powerful impact on its mind. Something in the English situation had become a trigger for this animal that caused its adverse reaction.

Now I am not saying this trainer didn’t try to correct the problem. Such information was not relayed to me at the time. It is certainly possible that circumstances were such that dedicating the time and effort it would take to overcome this problem was just not possible or feasible.  Often horse owners have unrealistic views of how long it takes to train a horse, let alone help a horse past a problem like this. Just determining what the trigger actually is can take months. They often opt to just get another horse since this one is “obviously not going to work.” In these situations, the trainer, no matter how skilled, is unable to do anything for the horse before it is removed from their care. It is an unfortunate fact that horses are abundantly available and it is often more cost-effective to start over with a new one than to fix serious issues.

What I am saying is, the horse has not decided to be a problem. They are not doing anything to spite you. When confronted with an issue that one might call an intentional act of defiance, one should take a step back and take a hard look at what is happening. Has that damn beast concluded that for this moment and for no reason, it is not going to do what it knows you want it to do, just to make your life more difficult? This, regardless of the fact that in doing so it has put itself in a position of great discomfort, with nothing to gain from it? Or is it more likely that there is some other factor involved you have not yet noticed, perhaps something you are doing yourself, that has is providing a counter stimuli and the horse is just reacting like a horse?

While the intelligence of horses may be a subject of debate, their awareness and sensitivity I do not think is in doubt. The thing or things causing a particular behavior may be so subtle as to escape our notice but to the horse, they are as clear as a neon sign with loudspeakers playing marching music. As trainers, we have to step back from the problem and as dispassionately as possible, survey the situation and make every effort to understand the big picture. Only then can we pick one of the four learning methods the horse responds to, that best addresses the correcting of the problem.

As important as understanding the instinctive, mental, and emotional nature of the horse is, it is just as important we understand our own. Only when we can honestly and dispassionately see ourselves do we begin to have any chance of seeing them.

In closing, I want to try to head off some hate mail from horse owners who are insulted when I suggest their horse problems are not intentional acts or that their horses are not as smart as they believe them to be. I personally believe my primary mount, Orion, to be a brilliant individual who has displayed behavior that I am hard-pressed to call anything but reasoned. His trick of glancing back at me when I first get on him bareback, just before he does a little crow hop for instance. This says to me, every time, “Hey boss, got a good grip back there do ya?” He only does it once, it is clearly not intended to get me off and he does it almost every time, but I am sure I am just anthropomorphizing. Just as I am when I work on some new activity with him for 45 minutes and it appears for all the world that I am just not helping him to “get it”, so I leave it and return to something else, then put him away, frustrated by my failure. Only to get him out two days later and have him execute the exact activity perfectly the first time. I swear I can hear him saying “Yeah, I was thinking about that after you left the other day, and suddenly, ah ha! So what do you want to do today?” By the way, this happens pretty regularly.

So you see, I am bad about this myself. It is easy to come to expect too much from an animal that has proven so smart in the past and to feel that on the days they don’t seem so smart, that they are just not trying. What is harder to do is realize that any horse is only as smart as the methods the trainer is using. So we do them no service when we think of them as humans and are only truly looking out for them and helping them when we remember they are horses. It is counterproductive and a little insulting I think, to do otherwise.