We all have our own tastes when it comes to music. And, as it turns out, so do mares. Recent research results show that some stallions’ whinnies are music to mares’ ears, while others are decidedly less appealing.

The study authors indicated that vocal communication is important for many mammals and is used to assess a variety of characteristics, including:

• Degree of familiarity with, and the identify of, the caller;
• The caller’s size;
• The caller’s dominance rank; and
• The caller’s age.

“One of the main functions of vocal signals is to attract new mates, strengthen male-female bonding, and coordinate copulation and even inform others about success of copulation,” explained Alban Lemasson, PhD, professor and director of the Laboratory of Animal and Human Ethology, a branch of the French national research center and the University of Rennes.

In horses, the whinny—a loud, long-distance call—is exchanged both between and within sexes, but whether mares display preferences to certain types of voices remained unclear. Lemasson and colleagues speculated that stallion whinnies also confer information regarding arousal and fertility and that mares would react differently to different whinnies