Team hopes findings will help improve equine welfare after showing cognitive abilities include being ‘goal-directed’
If they are goal directed they are more sapient than I am.
I was just thinking something similar. Perhaps envy.
Stupid horses knowing what they want and working towards it.
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!
Goddamit!
Tricksy horsesses!
The master plan being to kick you in the balls
To be fair, that describes me having a panic attack when my plans fall apart.
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?
Anthrocentrism go vrooom
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
and otherwise putting absolutely no thought into the existence of predators
That’s absolutely not what I said and that’s also not what “Thinking ahead and planning strategically” entails
It’s mind boggling how much people (especially Christians and very especially Amish) look at animals as lowly, base creatures with no sense of anything whatsoever. Like they’re complete automatons.
How did you conduct this study? Play chess with a horse?
Horse did a en passant and the researcher got mad
It then farted while running away, kicking.
Then, when it slowed down to a pace, it ate a chick
Holy hell
So a horse could plan and act out a murder?
No, but they could plan and act out a greater European conflict.
it looks like somebody in this story doesn’t understand the difference between strategy and tactics, which definitely seems like quite an important distinction in this case
Why is that important? If you want to separate the two, the strategy is obvious.
thinking tactically is short term, thinking strategically is long-term, especially with the “plan ahead” in the title
nothing about the test described in the article implies that horses are capable of doing that though
