Horses Use Facial Expressions And Smile Just Like Humans, Says Study

What surprised us was the rich repertoire of complex facial movements in horses, and how many of them are similar to humans.

Scientists at the University of Sussex have taken a long, hard long at our equine pals and determined that horses have 17 distinct looks of their own. Well, now you can throw that mean description right back at them, because it turns out that all human and horse faces may be similar.

While we are both mammals, of course, a new study says that we both share the unique quality of making honest facial expressions. Some of these movements, such as the raising of the upper lip and the widening of the eyes, turned out to be very similar to facial movements that humans make.

Inner brow raiser: Horses tend to raise the inner brow of the eye in negative emotional situations as an expression of sadness or fear.

The findings, published in PLOS ONE suggest evolutionary parallels in different species in how the face is used for communication.

“Even people who know horses really well sometimes can’t articulate exactly what it is about an expression that they’re seeing”, Wathan said.

Using a system devised by the University of Sussex called Facial Action Coding System (FACS), the study coded different equine facial expressions based on muscle movement.

“Facial expressions are made up of a number of different complicated movements that overlap in a dynamic way”, Wathan said. Humans use 26, while dogs have 16.

Karen McComb, professor of animal behaviour and cognition at the university and co-lead author of the report, said: “It was previously thought that the further away an animal was from humans, the more rudimentary their use of facial expressions would be”. They also carried out an anatomical investigation of the facial muscles that underpin these movements.

“This contributes to a growing body of evidence suggesting that social factors have had a significant influence on the evolution of facial expression”.