Researchers have just scientifically confirmed that horses do read other horses’ facial expressions without any other cues—body movements Photo Credit: iStock

If your horse could talk, these might be things he’d say when he’s around other horses. Though many owners have observed for years that their horses can communicate with each other through body language, researchers have just scientifically confirmed that horses do read other horses’ facial expressions. And that’s without any other cues—body movements, vocal sounds, or odors. Purely speaking, horses can pick up messages in facial expressions alone. And that, scientists say, is exciting news.

“Although (we know) horses produce clear facial expressions, we’ve never proven, until now, that the other horses around them actually pay attention to those expressions and use them to inform their own behavior,” said Leanne Proops, PhD, of the University of Sussex Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research group, in the United Kingdom.

To take out any risk of influence from other factors like movements, sounds, and smells, Proops and her fellow researchers tested 48 horses’ responses to photographs alone. They presented the mares and geldings, individually, with two headshots of the same unfamiliar horse. There were three different pairs of photos that the researchers used, each pair representing different states of mind: positive attention/agonistic, relaxed/agonistic, and positive attention/relaxed. (The researchers defined these expressions and their related emotions according to previous EquiFACS research on equine facial expressions