Listen up

WOULDN’T WE JUST love to be able to have a conversation with our horses? Perhaps to ask them why they behaved in a certain way or simply to know what they are thinking. Sadly, we can’t openly chat to them (unless you have telepathic abilities — see box, p62), so how can we work out what they are trying to tell us?

“One of the horse’s best ways of communicating with us is body language,” says Rosa Verwijs, an equine behaviourist and lecturer at Writtle University College. “However, it’s not always very obvious. For a start, some of the body language they use is very subtle and often missed by humans. Also, we know a lot about whether horses are showing signs of pain, stress, anxiety and anger, but what we don’t know is how they show if they are happy and enjoying what they are doing. It’s the absence of those negative behaviours that we perceive as happiness, but is it really happiness?”

Another complication is that horses by nature are often