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Horses Have 300 Word Vocabulary
United Kingdom -- The London Daily Telegraph carried a story on July 26, 1998 by Jo Knowsley about surprising results of research into the vocabulary of horses:

   FORGET commands such as walk, trot or canter. Horses can learn a vocabulary of about 300 words, according to new research.

  Dr Marthe Kiley Worthington, an equine behaviourist and author on equine welfare, has been studying young horses at her research centre in Throwleigh, Devon, for the past five years, after devising tests to measure their language learning potential.

   The results, she says, have been remarkable. Horses appear to have learnt nouns, positional words, verbs and adjectives such as "soft", "hard", and "prickly". They have also shown signs that they can understand emotional terms such as "scared" and "happy".

  The horses are kept in family groups and begin their "training" from birth. Each week, for 15 minutes, they attend a covered "schoolroom" where they are paired with human volunteers who help them to learn.

  They are taught the words for objects such as buckets and blankets. To learn the words for actions, they are shown a gesture while the word is spoken. The gesture is later dropped so that the horse must respond to the word alone.

  The animals, which have also been trained to imitate Dr Kiley  Worthington's gestures, are sometimes taken out on "structured expeditions". On these excursions humans speak clearly about what the horse, or the human, is doing; for example "Shemal [the horse] eats the grass". Or: "Jane [the human] picks the buttercup".

  Dr Kiley Worthington claims that her students can now select blue, red or yellow buckets, after being given only verbal cues, and will perform actions, such as kicking a ball, or picking up a blanket, on command.

  She said the animals appeared to react to words such as "scared" in the way they would normally react to a human who was exhibiting obvious physical signs of the emotion.

  "One of my horses will yawn if you ask him. Another will stop putting his nose to the ground if you say 'prickly', despite the fact that there is no evidence that the greenery he is about to eat is sharp or spiky," she said.

  "They react to the word. We use no gestures. By teaching your horse to listen to words and understand their meaning, he can learn to do many things on word command alone. The research has some way to go, but the early signs are very encouraging."

  The study had begun, she said, as an extension of her 25 year research into equine welfare and behaviour, the subject of her books. Her latest work, Equine Welfare, has a chapter on cognition.

  She said: "Clearly because of their different musculature and cognitive system horses are not going to learn to speak. But our training and research shows that they have far greater powers of comprehension than previously suspected. The animals we are working with now appear to understand at least 300 words."

  Dr Kiley Worthington said the training echoed the developmental psychology techniques used to study the comprehension of children who had not begun to talk. "Years ago everyone was conditioned to believe that animals acted only on instinct, that they had no cognitive thought," she said. "Nor did anyone believe that they could relate to human cognitive thought."

  But are the animals merely learning tricks? How much can they really understand? It has always been presumed that what separated humans from animals was self awareness and the use of language.

  But research in other animals, particularly primates, has shown that this might not be the case. The world was astonished when Roger Fouts, an animal behaviourist, taught a chimpanzee called Washoe to talk, using sign language.

  More recently, research on the cognitive powers and learning skills of pigs showed that they could learn to use computers. After tests by Prof Stanley Curtis of The Pennsylvania State University, scientists concluded that the pigs were at least as clever as chimpanzees.

  Roger Mugford, of the Animal Behaviour Centre, Chertsey, Surrey, said he was not surprised by the results of Dr Kiley Worthington's research, though he said they were not conclusive.

  Tina Gifford, 27, a member of the British equestrian team which won the World Championship four years ago, said she believed horses were intelligent and responsive to command, but doubted that they could actually think.

  "I think they respond to the tone of voice rather than the words that are used."

  Christopher Bartle, winner of this year's Badminton Horse Trials, said: "I think horses do understand a lot more than most people realise. Whether they can learn in the same way as a child is highly questionable."