Team hopes findings will help improve equine welfare after showing cognitive abilities include being ‘goal-directed’
Everything is goal directed right up to the…
REEEEEEEEEE! HOLY FUCK WHAT WAS THAT LITTLE NOISE OR MOVEMENT? RUNAWAY! RUNAWAY! RUNAWAY!
You fool! You absolute buffoon! That horse has been twelve steps ahead of you the entire time! The freakout was staged and part of its master plan!
If they are goal directed they are more sapient than I am.
but, famously, they never proceed directly towards their goal. they always take one step to the side after two steps forward.
Of course they can? They’re animals? They have brains? They need to think strategically in order to survive attacks by predators in the wild???
Do people really think that horses are just here to get humans around faster and that there’s nothing going on in there?
Humans love to seperate ourselves from the animal kingdom. We minimize them and pretend they are not capable of anything. We convince ourselves that no one else is even remotely close so we can attempt to justify our often horrific treatment of non-human animals
(Or at least some subset of the population anyway)
They need to think strategically in order to survive attacks by predators in the wild???
Do they really? I think most prey animals default to predator = run, which seems sufficient in most situations
That’s all well and good until there evolve predators that have complex brains and can think about how best to approach you such that you don’t know they’re there
If you think just running away from predators you see and otherwise putting absolutely no thought into the existence of predators is sufficient you would not last long in the wild lol
How did you conduct this study? Play chess with a horse?