02/07/2026
📚Interesting read for your Saturday morning! 📖

Did you know…Horses really can smell fear?
Research reported by The Guardian (Jan 2026) shows that horses can distinguish between human emotional states using olfactory cues, not just body language or behavior.
In controlled studies, horses were exposed to sweat samples collected from people experiencing fear and from those in a calm state. The horses showed measurably different behavioral and physiological responses depending on the sample presented.
This suggests horses are detecting chemosignals — chemical changes in human body odor associated with emotional states like fear or stress.
As prey animals, horses evolved to notice subtle environmental signals that indicate potential danger. Human emotional scent appears to be another source of information they process.
So when a horse reacts to an anxious handler, it may not just be “picking up energy” in a vague way, it may be responding to real, detectable sensory input.
This research adds to growing evidence that horses perceive humans through a combination of:
• visual cues
• posture and movement
• tone and rhythm
• scent
Prof Biagio D’Aniello at the University of Naples Federico II says, “the findings add to growing evidence that emotional signals can cross species boundaries, with horses reacting to human fear via smell,” he said. “This raises intriguing questions about how human stress or calmness might shape everyday human-horse interactions, from training to clinical handling.”
The more we understand how horses perceive us, the better partners we become.
(Source: The Guardian, Jan 14, 2026)
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