Social learning in horses from a novel perspective.

Horses have been domesticated in between 2.500 and 5.000 (Clutton-Brock, 1981) years ago, ever since humans tried to train them for fast and correct responses to special tasks. In this sense it appears to be important to gain more insight in equine learning abilities. Murphy and Arkins (2006) succeeded to write a comprehensive and very useful review on equine learning behaviour. Animal learning theories in general used to focus on explaining the mechanisms for individual learning and only for the last two decades social aspects and cognitive abilities of animals have been incorporated into learning research. It is not surprising that most equine learning research concentrates on the mechanisms of individual learning as well, although it is kind of obscure that there is very little knowledge about horses social learning and their cognitive abilities (Nicol, 2002; Murphy & Arkins, 2006), since horses have been companions to humans for such a long time. May be this can be explained by the fact that it is still under discussion whether animal learning theory is applicable to social learning, or whether different mechanisms are responsible for social and asocial learning (Heyes, 1994; Nicol, 1996).