News Notes

Why the Long Face?

By Modern Equine Vet News Staff

How effective are people at reading a horse’s face?

Scientists at Bournemouth University (BU) in Dorset, England, conducted a study in which a group of people—some experienced with horses and others with no horse experience—were shown pictures of human and horse faces and were asked whether the horse or the human was in pain or comfortable. Their responses were then compared with those of 10 equine behavior experts.

Overall, the accuracy of pain recognition was higher for human faces than for horse faces. But participants with horse-care experience were more accurate at recognizing pain in horses, with accuracy increasing with greater experience.

“Humans depend on horses as work animals, and they are used in leisure and sport across the world. But the extent to which we can recognize pain in horses has never been studied. We showed that people are generally very poor at seeing pain in horses, but people who have a lot of horse experience were a great deal better at recognizing these subtle signs of pain,” said Nicola J. Gregory, PhD, the principal academic in psychology at Bournemouth University.

The study also investigated how experiences of social anxiety influenced people’s ability to see pain in horse and human faces.

“We weren’t surprised that pain was easier to recognize in human faces, as we are exposed to these much more than animals,” Dr. Gregory said. “But a very interesting finding was that people who were more socially anxious were more accurate at recognizing pain in the human faces, but also saw more pain in the horses’ faces even when it wasn’t there.”

The researchers hope the findings will help develop a picture of which factors are essential in recognizing emotions in horses so that owners can better recognize painful changes, so they can get help and improve the welfare of these animals. MeV

For more information:
Gregory NJ, Trimmer M, Dempsey T, et al. Reading pain in horse and human faces: the influence of horse experience, social anxiety, and empathy. Anthrozoös. 2025:1-18. doi: 10.1080/08927936.2025.2551433 .
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08927936.2025.2551433