Turns out if you try hard enough, you can pick up on a horse's mood, even if you're not equestrian savvy.
A new study out of the University of Guelph suggests more people than expected can decipher the sound a horse makes — or a whinny — to determine if it's in a positive or negative emotional state.
"It was just an interesting question that my master's student and I came up with," Katrina Merkies, an associate professor in U of G's department of animal biosciences.
"This type of research has been done with dogs, so we were curious to know if horses would yield the same results, if humans can understand horse vocalizations the same way they can with dogs. It turns out I think they're better at horses than dogs."
An online survey polled more than 300 people, who listened to 32 audio clips of horses of different breeds, ages and gender.
More specifically, they were asked to use a rating system of one to 100 to determine, based on the whinny, if the horse was calm or excited, with a lower number indicating calm and a higher number indicating excitement.
"We hypothesized that if people were more experienced with horses, that they should be better able to categorize the horse's vocalization," Merkies said. "And we found that actually, that wasn't true.
"It didn't seem to matter whether the respondents were familiar with horses or not. They seem to be able to pick up the valence of the vocalization with pretty good accuracy."
Merkies said vocalization is just one way horses and humans can communicate, and horses don't use vocalization as their main form of communication, often relying on body language.
"But the vocalization aspect is just an interesting layer to add to that," she said.
