Does your horse love you

ARE OUR HORSES truly capable of loving us? It’s certainly an emotive question we ask ourselves, especially as many of us have a close attachment to our horses no matter the level of participation in riding.

To help us understand how horses perceive our relationship with us, we should first explore how feral horses interact with and experience relationships between conspecifics (other horses), to gain insight as to what they value when forming emotional connections and their motivations for forming strong social bonds.

Attachment theory

Attachment theory is a psychological theory that explores how mammals form bonds with one another. Research has shown that mammals are born with an innate drive to form attachments to caregivers and that the attachment style they develop is as a result of whether their needs are met, and their behavioural cues responded to. It has been extensively studied through observing the effects of separation on infants from their caregivers.

To form attachments there is an underlying motivation to regulate behaviours that