--- title: Horses Smile, Pout and Have Facial Expressions Just Like Humans description: Horse faces share some surprising similarities to humans in facial expressions, shows a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE canonical: https://time.com/3985988/horses-facial-expressions/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-05T18:00:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:58:16.135Z article:section: Health og:title: Horses Smile and Pout Just Like Humans, Study Says og:description: Horse faces share some surprising similarities to humans in facial expressions, shows a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE og:url: https://time.com/3985988/horses-facial-expressions/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf20cf381d599dfdd/69885e0bcd684879800a1214/horse-smile.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2592 og:image:height: 1458 og:image:alt: horse smile og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Horses Smile and Pout Just Like Humans, Study Says twitter:description: Horse faces share some surprising similarities to humans in facial expressions, shows a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf20cf381d599dfdd/69885e0bcd684879800a1214/horse-smile.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Horses Smile and Pout Just Like Humans, Study Says > Sponsored content. 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But soon biologists will clone long-gone animals in the hope to redefine that axiom to "DE-extinction is forever."_  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Aug 5, 2015 6:00 PM UTC  Courtesy of Jennifer Wathan  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Aug 5, 2015 6:00 PM UTC Horse faces share some surprising similarities to human faces, shows a curious new [study](http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131738) published in the journal _PLOS ONE_. After dissecting a horse head, analyzing its musculature, and scrutinizing 15 hours of horse video footage, a group of researchers managed to map out every possible facial expression a horse could make. It turns out our faces are a lot more similar than we think. “Horses and humans are distantly related and have such differently shaped faces that I personally thought there would be really no similarities,” says study author Jennifer Wathan, a PhD candidate in social cognition and communication in horses at the University of Sussex in the U.K. “But there was a surprising amount of similarities.” For the first time, Wathan and her colleagues created a full map of a horse face using a technique called the Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS). It’s a tool for objectively measuring facial movement, without letting subjective interpretations of facial expressions get in the way. Humans have a FACS (we make 27 separate facial movements), and so do chimpanzees (they make 13) and dogs (16 for them). But horses had even more: 17 facial movements in total. “Most people who have horses know they are expressive and use their ears a lot, but I’ve got to admit, I was really surprised by the extent to which they use their face,” Wathan says. “They’ve got a huge facial repertoire.” It’s not yet clear why there are similarities between humans and horses. “Whether animals communicate intentionally is still a huge and fairly contested issue,” she says. But three of our shared expressions particularly captivated Wathan. “One is raising the inner eyebrows,” she says—something humans do when we’re scared, surprised or sad. “You know, puppy-dog eyes,”she says. (Dogs really do this, by the way: one [study](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0082686) of shelter dogs, by Bridget Waller and Juliane Kaminski at the University of Portsmouth, found that dogs who raised their brows were adopted faster than dogs who didn’t. You can see what it looks like by watching this video that the researchers made to go with their study:) “They think that’s potentially because it enhances the proportions of the dog’s face to make them look more like human babies,” Wathan says. “It taps into our sensory biases to provide care for human babies.” Horses also do this expression, she says, “and it seems that they do it in negative emotional situations, too.” Humans also pull the corners of their lips back—also known as smiling—sort of like horses do. “It seems to be part of the submissive gesture,” she says, and younger horses tend to do it to older horses. Finally, both humans and horses widen their eyes in fear. Findings like these can help us understand the evolution of complex communication between species—and they may suggest that using complex facial expressions to communicate is an ancient ability we shared with our last common ancestor with horses, or that the ability has evolved under the social pressure to communicate with important social partners, Wathan says.” Horses, like us, have a rich social life where effective communication would be to their advantage, she says. “The ability to use complex facial expressions was one of these things that was kind of touted as being uniquely human,” Wathan says. “But other species are doing it, and we share these abilities with all the other species around us.” ## Transcript [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] My name is Stuart Brand and I was trained as an ecologist. Conservation is about to take a turn because the technology was gonna allow us to use the DNA that's in the museum specimens and fossils to bring back extinct species [ MUSIC ] The passenger pigeon was around for 6 million years. And people remembered how amazing it was that these animals darkened the sky for hours at a time. There's these stories about these giant flocks blocking out the sun. And their wings sounding louder than thunder. We developed the techniques to hunt and net these birds and basically killed them all. And then it was really gone. When I was growing up, my mother said when the last one died in 1914 it broke America's heart. It was one of the prideful things that America had to show the world, and it was gone. This book. This is essentially the bible of passenger pigeon. I am currently the lead researcher for the deextinction project to bring the extinct passenger pigeon back to life. When I say, oh, we'll bring back a passenger pigeon, everyone goes, oh, my god, that's like Jurassic Park. And no, no, it's not. Not at all. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before. Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. I don't think a pigeon is going to, you know, pluck lawyers off of toilets. No. [ SOUND ]. Aah! [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So how we're actually going to go about deextinction. Every organism has a unique code in their genes. This one would be good I think. So these are actual DNA codes. From a chunk of a passenger pigeon foot. Now, if you can get DNA, then we can actually make it into a living cell. We're going to sequence its whole genome. We're gonna build from scratch the code that is a passenger pigeon, one gene at a time. Compare it to its closest relative. [ MUSIC ] Then we're gonna introduce DNA into the living cell of a band- tailed pigeon. And when you introduce an extinct animal's egg cell into a new mother, then you've changed the game. [ MUSIC ] Which has been done. The extinct Iranian Ibex was successfully cloned. That was the first deextinction. In this particular case, the animal only lived about ten minutes, but it was a proof of concept, and with further efforts, we hope, followed by everything from the passenger pigeon to the Tasmanian tiger. It's one of the most famous human- caused extinctions in the world. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died in 1936. It was our direct activity that caused that extinction. For me, biotech is the future of conservation because our meddling is not unnatural. It is what species do. One of the things that gotten used to is the horrifying realization that extinction is forever. 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