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A study by the Universities of Portsmouth and Sussex reveals that horses can read and then remember people’s emotional expressions, enabling them to use this information to identify people who could pose a potential threat.

Published on 26 April 2018 in the journal Current Biology the paper ‘Animals remember previous facial expressions that specific humans have exhibited’ is authored by a team of psychologists, co-led by Dr Leanne Proops, from the University of Portsmouth, and Professor Karen McComb, from the University of Sussex – both specialists in animal behaviour.

As they had for more than a decade, Stuart Tyson Smith and his colleagues were excavating a tomb in what was Upper Nubia in their years-long UC Santa Barbara-Purdue University mission to understand the history of an ancient village on the fringes of Egyptian dominance.

But rather than finding mummified human remains, they unearthed the skeleton of a horse so well-preserved it had hair on its legs. It had been covered with a burial shroud, and among the items found with it was a piece of iron that appeared to be a cheek piece from a bridle.

Work aimed at developing a new vaccine to protect against abortigenic and neurological equine herpes virus (EHV) has begun at veterinary charity, the Animal Health Trust (AHT).

Managing soil by well-designed grazing is the key to an animal’s growth and wellbeing shows new research that links soil health, pasture value and sustainable production

Individual pastures on livestock farms yield surprisingly dissimilar benefits to a farm’s overall agricultural income, and those differences are most likely attributable to the varying levels of “soil health” provided by its grazing livestock, reveals a study published today.