[jamiek88]

To see a creature with not enough confirmation bias watch a horse if it encounters something even slightly usual. It will shy away and or investigate or refuse to move until you have investigated the slightly oddly positioned leaf on the path.

If we did indeed check everything we nevertheless expected to be as usual we’d never get anything done and would get stuck in mega loops.

[germinalphrase]

To hilarious effect with regard to llama competitions at the state fair. Very serious twelve year olds (god bless ‘em) leading their llamas through a rigorous course of “touch your nose to a mirror of death”, “walk the gauntlet of pool noodles”, “step across the tinfoil floor of doom”, “remain calm under the umbrella’s predatory gaze”.

[kleton]

Horses spooked by unexpected street markings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMyf6ewi7E8

[jhgb]

...and this is why road markings have legal standards in many countries.

[tyingq]

Interesting. Cows won't step over painted parallel lines if they have encountered a cattle guard before.

Where a cattle guard is parallel pipes in the road at a gate opening meant to keep them in...their hooves can't negotiate the spaces between the pipes.

Real one: https://www.conteches.com/Portals/0/Images/US%20Forest%20Gri...

Painted one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/gT5vU.jpg

[caseyohara]

The painted one is sorta funny, such a low tech solution. I recently came across this interesting tidbit: "Cattle grids are generally useless for containing goats. However, a Texas Highway Department official reported that adding three 20-inch (51 cm) painted stripes—arranged yellow, white, yellow—on the road in front of a cattle grid deterred goats from approaching or crossing the guard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid

[User23]

My brother did civil war reenacting pretty seriously (he had a bit part as a union soldier running across the battlefield and getting shot dead in the film Gettysburg, among other things) and he told me that a horse would get spooked by a coffee mug if it hadn't seen one before.

It gives you a whole new appreciation for HEMA and what it took to train destriers.

[travisjungroth]

I guess the utility of a novel thing to a herd, prey, plains animal is mostly likely about zero. The danger of the thing is higher.

[BeFlatXIII]

Horses also need to be desensitized to new objects twice: once on their right eye and once for their left.

[mannykannot]

That is an interesting observation. As prey rather than predator, however, a horse’s response has, more or less, been validated by the survival of the genus.

I would guess that a wild horse or mustang would not be frozen in place by such things, suggesting, perhaps, that domestication has created a conflict between instincts, which is sub-optimal for its rider, but not necessarily for the horse.

With regard to the general point about checking everything, you are correct, and it takes a certain amount of judgement to doubt one’s intuitions without being paralyzed by doing so.

[msrenee]

Mustangs behave pretty much the same as other horses when confronted with something scary. They're not really any different to work with than any other unhandled horse. Mustangs are not wild horses, btw. They're feral horses descended largely from the horses of the Conquistadors.

[mannykannot]

So much for my guess! BTW I am well aware that mustangs are not wild horses, which is precisely why I made the distinction in my original comment. When you say "any other unhandled horses", are you including truly wild horses?

[monocasa]

There arguably aren't truly wild horses anymore. The closest, Przewalski's horse, only exist in the wild as a population reintroduced from captivity. The captive population that they were reintroduced from very might well have been a more docile subset of the subspecies, making your question difficult to answer.