What we really want to do is work out what the emotional life of horses really is. What their emotional world is really like. To build her library of horse emotions, Karen has designed a set of experiments to trigger them.
She plays recorded horse talk and observes the response. Startled and afraid. or curious. She shows them photographs of horses and of humans. Toffee likes this one.
This one isn't so popular. Karen's team has made the surprising discovery that horses have 17 different facial expressions. That's three more than chimpanzees.
And one more than dogs. They're subtle. But by playing the images back, Karen can show me what the untrained eye might miss.
He's sniffing the ground ostensibly, and you'd think, oh, he's just sniffing the ground, another horse was in here, but stop. Actually, that sniffing the ground, again, occurs consistently and in response to something that's a bit more negative, so that he's unsure about this. Humans do that as well. You know, when we're a bit uncomfortable, we might scratch ourselves. or We glance away from something, just it gives us a little bit of time to adjust.
So this is, now this will be interesting. Look at what part of the face he's going to go to. Look, he's going towards the mouth, yeah. And sometimes they go right up to the eyes, yeah. It's interesting, that sweep between the mouth and the eyes.
It's almost as if they understand that the mouth and the eyes are the most significant bit of the human face. They have enough understanding to... interpret not only emotion in the faces of their own species but emotion in our faces. It makes sense that horses use emotions to communicate with each other but what fascinates me is they can read our emotions as well.
They're capable of putting together the sort of representation of the person with the emotion. To me, that shows a very acute emotional awareness.
horses have 17 facial expressions