Horses are very attuned to body language, both from other horses, and from people. They use body language to communicate with each other, and with us, if we pay attention to their bodies' messages. We can often interpret the focus of their attention by looking at their ears alone. Ears pointed forward; the horse is paying strict attention to the object that the ears are pointing at. Ears flopping to either side; the horse is relaxed and unfocused. Ears lying flat against the neck like a cowering dog's ears; the horse is unhappy or mad about something, and sending messages to get out of its space.
When one of my horses pin their ears, neighboring horses almost always respond by either moving away or by pinning their own ears while looking directly at the offending horse. A horse's ability to interpret voice communications is much less developed. Most horses don't actually seem to recognize their own name, although with training they do recognize and respond to several different verbal cues, such as kissing noises to move out, and the word "Ho" to stop.
There must be a spectrum of verbal ability, because one of the horses on the ranch responds to my voice much more than others. Sister responds to her name out in the pasture by lifting her head in the direction of my call. I tried calling a number of my other horses, and they uniformly ignored me. Sister's response in the field was my first clue that she listens well.
Yesterday she gave me another clue, while I rode her in the arena, working on one of her minor training issues. Sister does not like to trot by the fence of the arena. Rather than trotting along the arena rail, she likes to dive in toward the center of the arena. Yesterday, as she fell away from the rail, toward the open ground in the center, I said, "no". I said the word in a normal but firm, no nonsense tone of voice. Sister's surprising response was two-fold: 1) She promptly slowed down. (OK, this was not too surprising. "No" probably sounds much like "Ho", the voice command for "stop"). 2) This was the surprising part of her response: sister quit diving toward the center of the arena, and drifted back to the arena rail. I still needed to direct her toward the rail, but the interaction was much softer than that needed in the absence of the verbal correction. Wow, that was cool! She corrected the last thing that she had done (move off the rail), in response to hearing "No." I wonder if she likes music…
