Horses can identify our facial emotion?

Some kind of animals has been keeping a good friendship with the human. Dogs and cats have evolved for attracting our affirmative attention. And a result of a recent study suggests the possibility of the evolved ability of horses: facial recognition of the human.

In this study, some horses were examined if they can distinguish happy faces from angry faces of a human. The examinees could react properly, according to the author. Furthermore, horses kept the image of the emotional faces of the human for hours.

Current Biology: Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited

Since I cannot read the whole article, I am not sure whether the condition of the experiment was appropriately controlled. There is a popular episode of the biased outcome of an animal experiment, so-called "Clever Hans."

Thus, horses are well known to be good at sensing the atmosphere. Therefore, it is crucial to hide any hints from the horse so that it can guess the answer.

It is possible that some species of animal can read the human mind, in my opinion. But the way may not be limited to read the facial emotion. For example, it is possible that people who get angered effuse a particular smell. How to communicate with animals is still a challenging, and a wonderful issue.