Team hopes findings will help improve equine welfare after showing cognitive abilities include being ‘goal-directed’
Of course they can? They're animals? They have brains? They need to think strategically in order to survive attacks by predators in the wild???
Do people really think that horses are just here to get humans around faster and that there's nothing going on in there?
Humans love to seperate ourselves from the animal kingdom. We minimize them and pretend they are not capable of anything. We convince ourselves that no one else is even remotely close so we can attempt to justify our often horrific treatment of non-human animals
(Or at least some subset of the population anyway)
They need to think strategically in order to survive attacks by predators in the wild???
Do they really? I think most prey animals default to predator = run, which seems sufficient in most situations
That's all well and good until there evolve predators that have complex brains and can think about how best to approach you such that you don't know they're there
If you think just running away from predators you see and otherwise putting absolutely no thought into the existence of predators is sufficient you would not last long in the wild lol
and otherwise putting absolutely no thought into the existence of predators
That's absolutely not what I said and that's also not what "Thinking ahead and planning strategically" entails
