| Title |
Horse sense: social status of horses (Equus caballus) affects their likelihood of copying other horses’ behavior
|
|---|---|
| Published in |
Animal Cognition, January 2008
|
| DOI | 10.1007/s10071-007-0133-0 |
| Pubmed ID | |
| Authors |
Konstanze Krueger, Jürgen Heinze |
| Abstract |
Animals that live in stable social groups need to gather information on their own relative position in the group's social hierarchy, by either directly threatening or by challenging others, or indirectly and in a less perilous manner , by observing interactions among others. Indirect inference of dominance relationships has previously been reported from primates, rats, birds, and fish. Here, we show that domestic horses, Equus caballus, are similarly capable of social cognition. Taking advantage of a specific "following behavior" that horses show towards humans in a riding arena, we investigated whether bystander horses adjust their response to an experimenter according to the observed interaction and their own dominance relationship with the horse whose reaction to the experimenter they had observed before. Horses copied the "following behavior" towards an experimenter after watching a dominant horse following but did not follow after observing a subordinate horse or a horse from another social group doing so. The "following behavior," which horses show towards an experimenter, therefore appears to be affected by the demonstrator's behavior and social status relative to the observer. |
Mendeley readers
The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 154 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 2 | 1% |
| Japan | 2 | 1% |
| Moldova, Republic of | 1 | <1% |
| Italy | 1 | <1% |
| Brazil | 1 | <1% |
| Germany | 1 | <1% |
| United Kingdom | 1 | <1% |
| Netherlands | 1 | <1% |
| Sweden | 1 | <1% |
| Other | 1 | <1% |
| Unknown | 142 | 92% |
Demographic breakdown
| Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Student > Master | 25 | 16% |
| Student > Bachelor | 23 | 15% |
| Researcher | 22 | 14% |
| Student > Ph. D. Student | 21 | 14% |
| Professor | 12 | 8% |
| Other | 24 | 16% |
| Unknown | 27 | 18% |
| Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 60 | 39% |
| Psychology | 26 | 17% |
| Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine | 8 | 5% |
| Engineering | 7 | 5% |
| Business, Management and Accounting | 3 | 2% |
| Other | 17 | 11% |
| Unknown | 33 | 21% |
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 September 2023.
All research outputs
#7,452,489
of 22,783,848 outputs
Outputs from Animal Cognition
#969
of 1,451 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#41,905
of 156,517 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Animal Cognition
#9
of 12 outputs
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We're also able to compare this research output to 12 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 16th percentile – i.e., 16% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.