Horses have many ways to tell us how they’re feeling, such as swishing the tail, pricking ears, or pawing. But can they communicate on a deeper level? Can they directly express preferences, whether that’s choosing one blanket over another or signaling they’d rather work with a particular handler?

Researchers suggest they can, but understanding those preferences starts with knowing how horses learn, how they form associations, and how they naturally communicate through body language.

How Do Horses Learn?

“Horses learn by creating associations with the things that they’re learning about,” says Debbie Busby, PhD candidate, MSc, GMBPsS, MBACP, CEBC, CCAB, ABTC-CAB, a clinical animal behaviorist based in Tarporley, England. “They can learn to associate something, which we call a stimulus, with a positive feeling on their part, such as pleasure, or a negative feeling such as fear or feeling threatened by something.” For example, if your horse has a fear of the parked tractor, feeding him a treat or letting him graze near the tractor can help him associate the object with a pleasant feeling.

Horses also learn by operant conditioning, where they act, then the consequences teach them whether to repeat the action. For instance, if a horse paws at feeding time, then gets fed, he recognizes a positive consequence of his pawing.

Reinforcement training, such as when a rider puts their leg on to ask the horse to go forward or sideways, then removes the pressure when they get the response they want—a form of negative reinforcement, because you’re taking the pressure away—is another way horses learn.

Camie Heleski, PhD, MS, a senior lecturer in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Animal and Food Sciences, in Lexington, says reinforcement training is often the best way for horses to learn. “The horse, partly as a creature of prey, still does really, really well responding to well-timed negative reinforcement,” she says. “That’s probably the most consistent, and in some cases, quickest way to get them to learn a lot of the tasks that we expect and want from them.”

Positive reinforcement is the scientific term for rewarding a behavior by adding something horses enjoy, such as food or a scratch, especially on the withers—an act that’s been proven to reduce horses’ heart rates by up to 10%. Negative reinforcement is the term for rewarding behavior by removing something horses would rather avoid, such as pressure. It is not punishment or the addition of a negative experience.

Habituation, a form of nonassociative learning, happens when horses grow accustomed to something, such as living in a stall or having a specific routine they’re comfortable with, says Busby. Horses also learn through other process, such as observing other equine behavior.

How Do Horses Communicate With Humans?

While people use types of reinforcement training with horses, Busby says most humans don’t consider the horse’s preferences. “Horses are always expressing preferences to us, and it’s through their body language,” she explains. “We don’t know if they are consciously thinking, ‘Oh, and now I need to tell this person that I want to do this.’ They are simply behaving, and that behavior reflects what matters to them in that moment. It’s up to us to understand those signals and interpret them.”

Researchers have conducted several studies into horses’ communication and learning styles. In 2014 a research group led by M. Mejdell, PhD, of the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, developed a system allowing horses to communicate if they wanted a blanket on or not in the winter. Using symbols and positive reinforcement, they taught the horses to touch their muzzle to a board with symbols representing “blanket on,” “blanket off,” or “no change.” When horses chose an action, researchers immediately performed it, and then they tested their theory in different types of weather, where the horses decided what they wanted based on the conditions. The team reported this context-based decision making showed the horses understood the consequences of their choices and weren’t just performing a memorized trick.

Horses have also been found to understand referential communication. In a 2016 study, researchers confirmed domestic horses engage in intentional referential communication with humans by alternating their gaze between a human and the object they desire, such as a feed bucket, to ask for help. If the human failed to respond, they used other behaviors such as head-nodding or nudging the human.

“This comes back to the important point about being able to interpret the behavior, because lots of people would think that a horse nudging them was a rude, pushy horse, and it isn’t always the case,” Busby says. “It can be friendly behavior, or it could be, ‘Hey, that bucket’s over there. I can’t reach it. Can you reach it for me?’”

While not everyone might train their horse to choose their own blanket, owners can perform their own straightforward preference tests at home, says Heleski. “When I was in Michigan, we had this big barnyard that was all fenced in with a big pasture it attached to,” she explains. “Because the horses were so used to the routine, if there was a winter storm, I could open the door and give them the exact same hay in their stall as the hay out in the pasture. And probably three quarters of the time, most of my horses would still pick to go outside in the nasty winter storm versus stay in the stall. Now that’s small numbers, but that’s an example of semi-easy preference testing.”

Take-Home Message

While researchers have shown horses can be trained to communicate preferences, for the everyday horse owner, keeping a close eye on your horse’s body language and behavior can help you make safe and ethical decisions when training and handling your horse. “The missing piece is that it’s often the humans who aren’t listening, or who are misinterpreting what the horse is doing,” Busby says. “Horses are constantly communicating with us. They’re always telling us things they’d rather do and things they’d rather not do.”