If you ever thought about learning to speak horse, you're in luck!
A team of Swiss researchers found in a recent study that horses express their emotions through their whinnies (also known as a high pitched neigh).
After extensively studying the whinnies, the scientists learned that a horse's whinny comes in two different frequencies, reported Mail Online. One whinny is used to express happiness or sadness, while the other one tells how strong the emotion is - similarly to the way humans use different inflections in their voices when showing emotion.
"Such vocalisations with two fundamental frequencies are rare among mammals, in contrast, for example, to songbirds," Elodie Briefer, the project leader at the Ethology and Animal Welfare Unit at ETH Zurich's Institute of Agricultural Science, told Mail Online.
When a horse is happy their whinnies are a shorter duration (in which the higher fundamental frequency is lower), and it lowers its head.
This was the first horse study on the animal's vocalizations that describes how horses show emotion.
