Horses can smell your fear, bizarre study finds
Horses that were given cotton pads soaked in the sweat of a frightened human showed more signs of fear
Camille Loiseau/500px via Getty Images
Horses can smell human fear—and it changes their behavior.
It’s the result of an unusual experiment that involved letting horses smell a substance soaked in human sweat and seeing what they did next. the conclusions were published today In one more.
Horses exposed to sweat samples from people who had had scary experiences appeared to be more fearful themselves: The animals became easily startled, became hesitant to approach researchers, and became less likely to interact with unknown objects.
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“Our emotions are central when interacting with horses,” says Plotin Jardat, lead author of the study and a horse behavior and welfare researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. “If your horse doesn’t cooperate on the exercise you’ve proposed, trying it on another day when you feel different might be a game changer.”
Researchers already knew that horses could respond to humans’ emotional cues, including facial expressions And tone of voice. But the new study went further by examining whether horses can smell different emotions emanating from humans without those visual or verbal cues.
In the experiment, a group of people watched a pleasure-inducing movie clip while placing cotton pads under their armpits; These included a dance sequence from the film singing in the rain And the song “We Go Together” from the film. grease. The researchers then asked participants, armed with new cotton pads, to watch a horror movie for 20 minutes. horrifying To excite fear.
The sweat samples were then stapled to a custom muzzle for the horses to wear. To limit the stress on each test horse, a “spectator horse” served as a witness to the behavioral tests.
The researchers first measured how often a test horse would interact with the experimenter depending on what he smelled, both when he was being groomed and when the experimenter was standing slightly away from the animal. The horses that smelled the fear samples touched the experimenter less than the horses in the control group or the horses that smelled the joyful sweat samples.
The team then tested the horses’ reactivity by opening an umbrella near a bucket of food. Once again, horses who smelled the sweat of fear showed a different response than horses who smelled something else. Their physical reactions when startled were more intense, and their heart rates were higher.
The final test involved presenting the horses with a unique object – a type of figurine, made of linoleum, plastic and string. The researchers recorded how many times the horse looked at the object and how many times the animal touched it. The horses in the fearful group touched the new object less often and stared at it from a distance more than their peers.
Overall, the horses’ responses indicate that they can sense fear from odor alone, the researchers concluded. The study does not answer why horses can clearly do this: the ability may be the result of domestication, or it may arise from some inherent mammalian trait. But regardless, maybe don’t go near a horse immediately after watching a horror movie.
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