Horses are smart and cunning, they have a good memory. Akhal-Teke horses are monogamous. They serve the same master all their lives. All horses are trainable. So, the Arabian horse will never step on your foot, and the police breeds "Budenovtsy" and "Donchaks" are trained to disperse the crowd, so you should not expect delicacy from them.

To appreciate much of what "our smaller brothers" can do, it would often be necessary to use such terms applied only to people as "thinking" or "drawing a conclusion." However, the fear of meeting ironic views in response prevents scientists from saying these words aloud.

And here is an example that just speaks of the legitimacy of such terms. In the enclosed space of a large paddock, the mare-leader of the horse herd taught her wards to resist the enemy, although she had no previous experience in fighting a predator. She was simply smart by nature - after all, she became the leader of the herd. Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Zoology kept a herd of Przewalski's horses in the vicinity of Brandenburg - the only wild horse species in the world. The task of the experiments is to find out how, after a hundred years in the zoological garden, these horses will behave in the wild.

The idea was that a large dog, which was given the appearance of a wolf, attacked the horses in the enclosure. As soon as the collie, disguised as a steppe predator, was released inside the corral, to the herd, the horses, sensing danger, became agitated, and when the "wolf" approached about ten meters, the herd rushed in all directions. "The horses were frightened, and their behavior was appropriate - chaotic and uncoordinated," says Dr. K. Scheibe, the head of the experiment.

The experiments were repeated, and the researchers saw that the leader of the herd began to collect animals and, in full view of the "wolf", prepare them for protection. And now, as soon as the "wolf" was launched into the corral, the horses gathered in a herd and stood up in a defensive position: they formed a ring, with their heads inward, and with their powerful hind legs outward, so that a mortal blow awaited the approaching enemy. The leader awakened in the herd an instinct that had fallen asleep in captivity. This is what horses usually do when there are foals in the herd - they are hidden inside the ring. When there are only adult animals in the herd, they, rallying in two or three, go on the offensive against the predator. This time, scientists had to rescue the "predator" from a dangerous situation for him.

Learning and heredity are the two components that underlie human development. But the same can be said about learning in the animal world. "Individual training and genetic inclinations work together and cannot be separated," is the conclusion of ethologists. Scientists use in their experiments the desire of animals to learn. In appropriate experiments, they grope for the mysterious presence of intellect in "our smaller brothers". Acting under the slogan: "First teach the animal, then it will show what it can do," they try to find the mechanism of perceptions and memory.