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Q: Do horses learn behaviors by watching other horses?

A: Horses are great learners in many ways, but in general we find horses are not good observational learners. Researchers have conducted numerous studies where one group of subject horses watch experienced horses performing a task, or inexperienced horses learning a task, and another group of subject horses don’t watch. Then both subject groups are tested to see which learns the task quicker. And there is no statistical difference between them, so observing another doesn’t appear to help a horse learn more quickly. These studies use food rewards as the objective of the learning tasks, and even though food is a great motivator for horses to learn, maybe that particular research design doesn’t test all the ways a horse might learn by observation.

So why does it sometimes seem like horses learn by observing others? This comes up a lot when people have a cribber in the barn and they worry that other horses will learn to crib from him. Some would say just the environment or management practice is conducive to multiple horses adopting a behavior, such as cribbing. That’s a tad weak explanation for a stereotypy though