A horse named Hans; the search for a 'talking animal'

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1988 by James Serpell

A horse named Hans

A recent study in the United States revealed that three-quarters of all books and stories written for children are either about animals or contain animals as important central characters. In the vast majority, animals are endowed with essentially human thoughts and feelings and, more often than not, they are able to talk.

Although obvious to anyone who has ever browsed through the average child's bookshelf, these findings are nevertheless intriguing. After all, why should adults writing for children evidently assume that their readers will identify more readily with animal characters than with human ones? And what is the point of encouraging children to imagine that animals can talk when every child will eventually discover that they cannot? At least not in the sense that humans talk. The more one thinks about it, the more curious it seems.

While this notion of animals and people talking to each other is doubtless peculiar, it is far from being a recent or a Western invention. It is older and more widespread than literature itself. The creation myths of indigenous peoples throughout the world hark back to a time beyond memory--a time such as the "dreamtime" of the Australian aborigines--when gods, animals and people lived together and communicated as equals in a common language. Even the biblical account of creation implies a state of harmonious coexistence between Adam and Eve and the non-human denizens of the Garden of Eden. And Noah, we are told, was able to communicate sufficiently well with doves and ravens that he could send them out on search missions.

Indeed, as late as the Middle Ages in Europe, the ability to communicate with animals was regarded as a sure sign of budding sainthood. According to legends, many of the early Christian saints possessed a special rapport with the birds and beasts. The nature mystic, St. Francis of Assisi, for example, preached sermons to rapt audiences of birds, and was able to tame wolves, sing duets with nightingales, and still the chattering of swallows or the croaking of frogs. In this modern age of scientific objectivity, such stories seem quaint and fanciful. Yet, ironically, the concept of people talking to animals and vice versa continues to flourish as never before.

The recent revival of interest in such phenomena began with a horse called Clever Hans. Hans belonged to a retired school-teacher, Wilhelm von Osten, around the turn of the century in Germany. Convinced that his horse was exceptionally intelligent, von Osten decided to teach it to solve simple mathematical problems using the same techniques he had used to teach children. Hans far exceeded his expectations and proved to be exceptionally gifted. When asked to solve a simple problem, for example six subtracted from eleven, the horse would give the correct answer by tapping five times on the ground with his right foreleg. Only rarely did he make serious errors.

Once the news of von Osten's clever horse reached the rest of Europe, Hans became a notable sensation. Visitors poured in to see the horse perform, and most of them went away convinced that Hans was an equine genius. Even those who suspected trickery, including many eminent scientists, were baffled to discover that the horse could still answer people's questions correctly when his trainer was out of sight. His fame spread, and Clever Hans rapidly became a household name.

Sadly, it was not to last. Two professors with the names of Stumpf and Pfungst were determined to prove that Hans was a fraud. They designed a series of experiments, in the first of which two people agreed on a problem they would ask the horse. One of them would whisper the problem in the horse's ear, and then retire from view behind a screen. In this test, where both experimenters knew the right answer, Hans usually solved the problem correctly. In the second test, however, one experimenter thought up a problem without telling the other, and he then whispered it to the horse and retired as before. In this situation, Hans was apparently unable to give the correct answer.

Further investigations revealed that Hans was, indeed, very clever, but not in the way that people had thought. Hans's skill lay in his ability to detect the minute and subtle variations in people's posture and facial expression whenever he solved a problem correctly. To get the right answer, all Hans needed to do was to continue tapping on the ground until he received the appropriate signal to stop from his mystified audience. Everyone, including the disillusioned von Osten, had been fooled because they were unaware that they had been transmitting any signals to the horse (in humans, non-verbal messages of this kind are transmitted unconsciously). They had drastically underestimated the animal's powers of perception and, as a result, had fallen into the trap of assuming that Hans actually understood the problems he was solving.

In reality, Clever Hans was not particularly exceptional. Talking animals, or at least animals with amazing powers of understanding, had been known about for centuries. Clever Hans was, however, the first such animal to be subjected to detailed scientific scrutiny, and his eventual "exposure" cast a shadow of scepticism over all subsequent phenomena of this kind.