16/08/2026
Interesting thank you Emotional Horsemanship by Lockie Phillips, thoughts?
Are Horses Really “Only in the Present Moment”?
One of the ideas I have become increasingly interested in challenging in my own work is the statement that horses live entirely in the present moment.
I have used the phrase “a horse is not living only in the present moment” many times in my teaching. But what do I actually mean by that?
I am not suggesting that horses think about past and future in the way humans do. I don't think your horse is standing at the gate constructing an autobiographical narrative about last Tuesday, worrying about next Thursday, plotting revenge or contemplating their retirement plan. Human and Horse brains have many similarities, and a few very important differences.
Horses do not have a human-like prefrontal cortex. Their prefrontal cortex is described in recent equine cognition research as very "underdeveloped" when compared to ours, and we should be extremely cautious about attributing human executive/abstract/complex cognition to them.
But here is where it gets interesting.
Does different neural architecture necessarily mean a horse cannot cognitively orient towards something that isn't actually happening yet? Just because a horse does not anatomically have the brain region we associate with the ability to think outside of now, does not necessarily mean that horses are biologically locked into thinking only about now.
This is why I agree with my critics who say I am not scientific enough. I am not. Because the current science is not enough for me. The current science does not adequately account for the degree of complexity and cleverness I have known in so many horses, without fail.
Increasingly, I don't think we can confidently say that horses are always in the moment.
For years, my suspicion came primarily from working with horses and my professional case load, rather than peer-reviewed research. I would see horses apparently responding not simply to what was happening, but to what their previous experience told them was about to happen.
The physical event wasn't happening yet. But the horse was already responding. I prefer to study this in a manner that enables us to transcend technique. What happens when the carefully curated aid we practiced is no longer needed, because the horse already knew what you were going to ask, and is already accomplishing it with you long before our so called "Superior Executive Functioning" managed to orient itself into action? Good stuff happens. Really good stuff.
In 2024, researchers at Nottingham Trent University published a fascinating study.
Horses were taught a task involving touching a card for food. Eventually a light indicated when touching the card would or wouldn't result in a reward. Initially, the horses appeared pretty bad at following the rule.
Then the researchers introduced a cost for getting it wrong, a short time-out in which the horse couldn't receive a reward.
Their behaviour changed dramatically and immediately.
Rather than gradually learning the rule through repeated attempts, the horses suddenly made significantly fewer errors. The researchers proposed that the horses may have understood more about the task than their earlier behaviour suggested and altered their strategy once the consequences changed. They describe the findings as potentially consistent with model-based learning and goal-directed behaviour.
One of the researchers made a point I find particularly interesting. Horses have a very underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the structure we traditionally associate with this kind of cognition in humans. Instead of concluding that horses therefore cannot perform the cognitive task, she suggested they may be achieving something similar using another part of the brain.
In other words, perhaps we need to be careful about deciding what another species can think based upon whether their brain looks sufficiently like ours.
There is a considerable difference between saying:
“A horse thinks about the future in the way a human does.”
I don't think we have sufficient evidence to confidently say that.
And saying:
“A horse's behaviour in the present can be profoundly influenced by remembered experience and anticipation of what happens next.”
There is substantial evidence that horses possess significant long-term memory. Experimental work has demonstrated retention of learned categories and concepts over periods of many years, and other research has suggested that horses may possess a trainable form of prospective memory.
This is much closer to what I mean when I talk about a horse being “out of the present moment.”
Imagine a horse becoming agitated well before their feed actually arrives. Nothing unpleasant is happening. But perhaps the quad has started. Buckets are moving. A particular gate has opened. Another horse has called.
Those things have meaning because yesterday, and the hundreds of days before yesterday, they predicted what happened next.
Or imagine a horse responding strongly to the sight of a whip that isn't touching them. The whip exists in the present. But its meaning has been constructed through history.
Research has shown that previous interactions can form memories which subsequently influence how horses respond to humans.
So is that horse “in the present”? Technically, of course they are. But behaviourally, the present moment is being informed by the past and organised around what may happen next.
That is the distinction I am trying to describe. And I think my language around this can become more precise.
Perhaps “not in the present moment” is useful observational language, but insufficiently precise scientific language. So good thing I am a nerdy horse-trainer who loves science and not a scientist. Those two identities don't always have to be enemies, provided we're clear about which one we're representing.
This is also where I become cautious about allowing any single explanatory framework to define the outer limits of what horses are capable of.
Science is supposed to change when better information arrives. Our horsemanship should too.
We should take learning theory seriously. Take neurobiology seriously. Take associative learning seriously. Be extremely cautious about anthropomorphism.
But we should be equally cautious about the opposite error: assuming an animal lacks a cognitive capacity simply because they don't possess the human neurological machinery we associate with that capacity.
Much of animal cognition has historically had to wrestle with a very human problem: we are using human intelligence to investigate intelligence that isn't human.
The horse doesn't need to think like us to be intelligent. They need to think like a horse. And we're still discovering what that actually means.
For me, this is part of transcending technique. Use what we know. Respect what has been demonstrated. Be honest about what remains hypothesis, professional observation or simply an unanswered question.
And remain curious enough that the horse standing in front of us is still allowed to show us something our existing framework hasn't explained yet.
P.S.
Did you read this whole post? Drop "Read!" in your comment (if you comment) so folks know if commentators are actually reading the thing they are engaging with or not. :)
