Bit of a horse psychology question (understanding language)

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vicm2509

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Instuctor brought some of her youngsters back from Germany last night, which got me thinking.

Do horses understand words or is it more the tone? Say you got a foreign horse that was broken in in Germany for instance. So you get it home and decide to lunge it, will it not get confused as you are asking it to do things in English, when from the day it was born its been spoken to in German??

And if they do understand the words rather than the tone, how long would it take a horse to give the same response to a different word?

I really hope that makes sense and doenst make me sound like a complete wally
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I'd say it's def tone and not words they understand! Sometimes when I'm lungeing my horse I'll say things like 'come on you big lump - move your @rse!'. He does move, but I think he'd be pretty smart for his english to be that comprehensive! maybe there are certain things about some words that they understand, but I think they would quickly get the idea.

(it's just occurred to me, my horse is from NL and he lunges like an angel to Engllish words. He only came over at the end of 2005)
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I don't know, I knew a german horse who'd been in England many years, when I spoke to her in German her face was a picture and she came to me???!!! It looked as though she was pleased to have someone who spoke her previous language. On the other hand a while ago now I was schooling out hacking and my boy wouldn't stop messing around and I said to him "If you don't give me what I'm asking for you're getting schooled until you've done it when we get home". He submitted to me immediately all the way home????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Deffinately tone and length of word...I have tested my horse out with this as he is trained to voice commands and if you replace trot and walk on for something else but use the same tone he still responds!!!
 
yup, i'd say tone as well, but horses do learn words as well - there's the concious language (tone, volume, etc) of our language when speaking to our horses, and the unconcious parts of out language too - for example "stand".
 
I don't know but have often wondered if horses have accents same as we do i.e. when they whinny to their friends do they sound German, Spanish etc lol
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