Horses' Long-Term Memory Put to the Test

It seems that elephants aren’t the only large animals out there with an impressive memory: French researchers have confirmed that horses are also able to retain what they learned a long time ago—for better or for worse, reports thehorse.com.

“Once they’ve learned something, they’re not going to forget it easily!” said Lea Lansade, PhD, researcher in the behavior science department of the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Tours, France. “And they’re not just going to forget it over time. For riders, that has both pros and cons. If you teach your horse something, he’s going to remember it for years and years, even if you haven’t practiced it in the meantime.

“But the downside is that if he has had a bad experience, he won’t forget that either, and he can pull out his defensive mechanisms against that bad experience many years later,” she said. “He won’t have forgotten it.”

Read the full article at www.thehorse.com