The Horses at the Kentucky Derby Are Very Confused

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

The Derby and the two subsequent races that make up the U.S. Triple Crown are normally the year’s highlights for American enthusiasts, but this season will be even more packed with equestrian sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will feature international riders in dressage, show jumping, and the hybridized “eventing” discipline, and these competitions may generate more interest than usual because France is, as the Fédération Equestre Internationale puts it, “heaven for horse lovers.” Equestrian sports first made their Olympic debut in Paris more than 100 years ago.

Equestrian activities such as racing, show jumping, dressage, and eventing are the only elite sports that feature pairs of athletes that are fundamentally unknowable to each other. No one can doubt that the horses are trained specialists. But it’s difficult not to wonder if they have any idea what’s going on.

Deciphering the precise extent of any animal’s cognitive abilities is a tall order. The size and structure of other species’ brains can tell us plenty about how their bodies function, but not what degree of conscious thought or human-style intelligence they’re capable of. What we know about horse cognition in particular is limited, in part because “horses are big and expensive research animals,” says Sue McDonnell, an animal behaviorist and the founding head of the Equine Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Most of the questions researchers have asked about what it’s like to be a domestic horse are about how they understand humans, not how they understand their surroundings. Horses, for instance, have been found to recognize emotion on humans’ faces and recall them later on. Some recent work demonstrates that horses may be able to perceive basic goals of the humans working with them. They may even attach emotional memories to specific human voices. Cognition-wise, we know that horses possess enough intelligence for basic creative problem-solving and limited working memory. But attempts to understand their internal experiences have been mostly inconclusive, and the data that do exist come nowhere near confirming that horses are able to conceptualize competitive sports (let alone the state of Kentucky).

[Read: Horses can read human facial expressions]

The question of what horses are thinking and feeling during a race, if not a desire for bragging rights or a flowery cape, is hotly debated among the people who study, train, and compete with them. “I can only judge by their expression, but I can say for certain that for most of them, it’s terror,” McDonnell told me. The big, loud crowd; the tight space; and the close presence of unfamiliar animals they can smell but not see prime racehorses to react with adrenaline and fear when the starting bell sounds, she said. “You’d never see that speed in the wild horse unless they were threatened and stressed.” Their fear would be justified: Though the rate of fatal racehorse injury is at a near-15-year low, more than 300 died in 2023, and sport horses experience health issues such as gastric ulcers and pulmonary hemorrhage at rates of more than 70 percent.

It’s quite likely that the horses we race, jump, and otherwise prance about with feel stress while competing: Multiple studies from the past several years have shown as much by testing cortisol levels and other physiological indicators of tension. And though stress isn’t always harmful, evidence suggests that the training racehorses in particular go through can alter, and perhaps damage, their immune health. And we have no way of quantitatively measuring their level of psychological distress, because emotions like anxiety and fear don’t always manifest uniformly.

But horses have also learned to communicate how they’re doing in ways that don’t require laboratory analysis. Like us, they’re incredibly social animals, even with members of other species. (One growing trend in equestrian sports is to provide a lifelong travel companion for jet-setting horses in the form of a pony or goat, McDonnell said. “They’re just much more relaxed when they have their pony friend traveling with them.”) People who spend lots of time with horses can reasonably expect to be attuned to their emotional state. No assessment of a competition horse’s experience is complete without considering the horse-rider relationship, says Rachel Hogg, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University, in Australia, whose Ph.D. work focused on that bond.

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

Many equestrian professionals do not believe that their animal colleagues are plagued by fear and anxiety. “Horses enjoy sports when it’s within their capabilities, when they’re treated with respect, and when training practices bring their personality and athleticism out,” says David O’Connor, the chief of sport for the United States Equestrian Federation, and a three-time Olympic medalist in eventing. But how we value a horse’s enjoyment depends on their level of intelligence. Horses might not be capable of realizing that some of their stablemates aren’t at the Olympics or careering around a racetrack. Would their happiness matter more to us if they were?

Part of the reason O’Connor is so adamant that some horses enjoy sports is that he’s seen what happens when they don’t. In the nearly 30 years he spent riding for the United States, O’Connor told me, he regularly saw horses opt out of participating. “Sometimes you’ll get a horse in the starting gate, you’ll start the race, and one of them will just be like, I’m not doing it,” he said. “Or they go out there and take two or three steps and they’re done.” Recognizing a horse’s agency isn’t just good for morale—it can save a rider from potential embarrassment.

Cultivating relationships with horses in which those signals are never missed is the foundation of O’Connor’s riding and teaching, he told me. But not everyone follows that ethos. Sometimes, genuine cruelty is involved: “There’s this tradition in the horse world that you have to dominate them,” McDonnell said. But more often, the barrier to a trusting relationship between horse and rider is logistical. Even at the highest levels of the sports, athletes can rarely afford their own horses, let alone the costs associated with getting them competition-ready.

The Olympic disciplines, in particular, are not conducive to deep relationships between horse and rider. They’re dominated by a “speed dating” system where business-driven owners seek to optimize matches for specific competitions, rather than lifetimes, Hogg said. “Catch riding,” where a horse-rider pair will interact just one or two times before competing together, is more common than ever, she added; athletes can train with nearly two dozen horses in a single day. (At the U.S. collegiate level, catch riding is sometimes mandated to eliminate advantages.) As a result, Hogg told me, some riders see investing in emotional relationships with individual horses as a luxury they literally can’t afford with prizes on the line.

[From the July 1925 issue: Inside the sordid world of horse racing]

And yet the horses at international sporting events, which cannot open bank accounts, are probably more likely to enjoy themselves when paired with an athlete they know well, Hogg said. Research has found that horses prefer and can even be calmed by the presence of familiar humans, and evidence suggests that as a horse and rider get more familiar with each other, their patterns of brain activity begin to sync up during rides. “If a horse is motivated to be involved” in equestrian sports, Hogg said, “it’s because of their social connection with us.”

Redesigning equestrian sports entirely around horses’ psychological welfare would be like redesigning the NFL to completely eliminate injuries: The product would be unrecognizable, and a lot of powerful people would stand to lose a lot of money. It’s also unlikely to be a top priority in a sport where horses are still regularly injured or killed. But maybe just once, instead of holding the Kentucky Derby, a crowd could gather to watch 20 horses simply hang out together at Churchill Downs on live television. They could even bet on which one becomes self-aware first.