previous theories that equine brains respond only to immediate stimuli and are not complex enough to strategise

Who held those theories? And have they ever been around horses?

Just this weekend my spouse and I had to move our mare and almost 4 month old colt. She’s quite used to riding in a small horse trailer, but the little guy was terrified of getting into it. When his mom realized it, she started getting on and off the trailer several times to show him it was fine. Then she went behind him and kept nudging him towards the trailer. Seemed pretty obvious to me that she knew what was going on and was trying her best to help the little guy understand it was all ok.

I’ve certainly met some horses that could have made me question the species’ intelligence if they were the only ones I knew. But there are plenty of intelligent horses out there. I’m really surprised that the prevailing theory was that they only respond to immediate stimuli.

Great, so now in addition to being big enough to kick me to death they can now plan how they're gonna get away with it.

I am constantly surprised by how often you get reports of "animal such and such is capable of basic task".

I would assume it's a case of misreporting technical information, but then you hear how entrenched some professionals on the field are when it comes to assuming some type of exceptional, unique magical property in human brains and how "antropomorphizing" is used as a dirty word and it makes you wonder. I once had a biologist get very angry at me for suggesting dogs are capable of play behavior, so all bets are off, I guess?

so many of these behaviors are in so many animals but we can't say with any degree of confidence till a study is done. I have seen squirrels strategize.

Horses are treated pretty poorly during training, many trainers assume horses don’t have any conscious functioning, like their dog for example

We had a horse named Doc that I'm pretty sure plotted how he was going to kill me every time we went to work. More than once I had to do a tuck and roll when he suddenly decided to go over and try to crush me.

He was smart, but not smart enough to realize where that ended.

I've never trusted horses. Now I know why. They're plotting.

As one of nature's pedestrians, I'll never trust a creature that looks at me with it's teeth. Even I could tell you those bastards are plotting something all of the time

I’m curious if similar experiments have been tried with other animals? Can we tell if model-based reinforcement learning is common to all mammals, or did it evolve independently in different lineages?

What do the horses say about researchers?