Now There's A Comprehensive Guide To Horses' Facial Expressions
That's one expressive horse face. Boblefou via pixabay Animals, like humans, use facial expressions to communicate emotional states. But there was no systematic way for researchers to correlate these facial movements across species or with the appropriate context. Now a team led by researchers from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom has created a standard to measure horses’ facial expressions, which could help caretakers better understand when horses are distressed. The research was published today in PLOS ONE. The original Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS) was designed for humans, based on the anatomy of facial muscles and designed to give researchers an objective framework of facial expressions. It's been useful for psychologists and animators, and laid the groundwork for facial recognition software. These researchers turned to horses because they’re both visual and...