Mare and Foal Sanctuary's video: The Confident Horse - Body Language

Horses are a social prey animal that live in groups. As a result, quick, easy and often silent communication is essential so that they can keep themselves safe. They are constantly assessing their environment for any signs of danger. Horses need to be able to communicate any potential threats to their companions quickly and have developed a complex communication system through their body language. This often involves using very subtle cues to communicate. Humans generally find it easy to identify the big behavioural signs that horses display such as rearing, bucking, biting, kicking, but we may not be so adept at recognising the smaller, more subtle signs. When we don’t recognise or respond to our horses more subtle signs of communication it results in them having to ‘scream’. Of course, horses can’t actually scream, so they use big behavioural explosions to do this instead. Where big behaviour explosions happen there will always have been many small, subtle signs of communication that came before. If these are ignored the horse is left with no option other than to escalate their behaviour. Horses are communicating with us constantly during every single interaction we have with them. They will also be constantly learning things from our reactions and responses, whether we intend for them to or not.