Tool use confirmed in horses

A new German study has confirmed that horses do use tools, however the researchers say this is a rare phenomenon.

Scientists once considered tool use one of the features that set humans apart from other animals and a sign of higher cognitive abilities. A ‘tool’ could be defined as any object manipulated by an animal in order to perform a specific task. Use of a tool can be very simple, for example manipulation of a stick to scratch the animal's back, or an animal waving a stick at another to chase them away.

Tool use has never been shown in horses, but research has found many animals use tools quite adeptly – including birds, elephants, primates, rodents and dolphins.

Equine behaviour scientist Konstanze Krueger and her colleagues have identified 13 unambiguous cases of tool use in equids by twelve horses and one mule. As this subject is difficult to research with conventional methods, the team used crowdsourcing to gather data.

From 635 reports, including 1014 actions, the team found 13 unambiguous cases of tool use. Tool use was associated with restricted management conditions in 12 of the 13 cases, and 8 of the 13 cases involved other equids or humans.

The most frequent tool use, with seven examples, was for foraging, for example, equids using sticks to scrape hay into reach. There were four cases of tool use for social purposes, such as horses using brushes to groom others, just one case of tool use for escape, in which a horse threw a halter when it wished to be turned out, and one case of tool use for comfort, in which a horse scratched his abdomen with a stick.

Krueger said it is important to be aware of possible biases in owner reporting when crowdsourcing. “Collecting data with crowdsourcing methods may introduce biases into the data set. We took care to exclude unreliable or biased reports.” The horses’ current or previous caretakers may have unintentionally reinforced behaviour which may not be obvious to those reporting. “Therefore, we take our findings at face value and provide interpretations that would be appropriate for an unbiased data set.

The team concluded “that horses have the potential to develop behaviour involving tool use, particularly to improve their situation when management conditions are restricted, for example for foraging and improving social contact; however, this remains a rare phenomenon.”

I’m sure we’ve all seen horses that take brushes or feed bowls into their mouths and manipulate them, however for this behaviour to be considered tool use it would need to be used to perform a specific task, without the horse having been trained to do this. Is this something you have seen your horse do?

The study is free to access and very interesting, well worth a read: Krueger, K.; Trager, L.; Farmer, K.; Byrne, R. Tool Use in Horses. Animals 2022, 12, 1876. You can read the study in full here: https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12151876