A year ago last fall, I travelled to Ottawa to visit my two former show horses whom I hadn’t seen for several years, now retired to a princely life of light hacking and much adulation. When I approached them in their field and called their names, they marched straight toward me, bypassed their current owner, and each planted a forehead firmly on my chest.

As I wiped away my tears and concluded that this old scientist was definitely going soft, the encounter later triggered an interest in what we really know about horses’ memory for, and attachment to, their humans.

We know that horses remember things (both good and, unfortunately, bad) for a very long time, with seemingly little memory decay. For example, horses trained to perform a particular task or apply rules of concepts and categories to obtain a food reward, retain this learning up to 10 years later and can apply it to novel situations, with no practice in between (Hangi, 2009; Valenchon & Lansade, 2013).

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