Are Horses Smarter Than Cows? (Answered!)

My son is at the stage in his life where he’s always asking questions about which animals are smarter, which are the strongest, which are the fastest—as boys his age often do.

He’s always been very fond of the horses we have and while we were both out watching them the other day, we heard a cow mooing from a nearby field.

I saw my son’s neurons firing and almost immediately he started comparing horses and cows for his questions.

One he asked that really got my interest, was which one was smarter.

I really wasn’t sure, so I decided to look into it.

So, are horses smarter than cows?

Answering that question can really depend on how you define intelligence, but when comparing results from a few key metrics, horses seem to have a greater advantage of intelligence over cows. Horses have a greater ability to learn tasks and indeed execute them than cows.

This is, essentially, a broad generalization, since it can be difficult to say with any real precision how smart an animal actually is.

Horses are generally considered pretty smart with a desire to be trained, instructed, and to please their owners.

Cows are less interested, usually, although this is not to say always.

Let’s look at how we might define intelligence, and what that means for the question of which animal is smarter.

How do we define intelligence?

It’s a tricky question to be able to directly and concretely define intelligence in humans, let alone in animals.

What it means for some people might be different to others.

For example, take people who own cows as companions or pets, rather than livestock.

They most likely do form deep emotional relationships with their cows, and for this reason couldn’t be told that a horse is smarter.

That said, intelligence in animals can be defined by a few key metrics.

One is simple brain size.

Horses have larger brain sizes relative to their body, which in the most utilitarian and clinical sense, gives them higher cognitive ability.

The size of the brain, it is thought, determines how well animals can learn.

Another metric is temperament.

It’s not necessarily a direct indicator of their intelligence, but does give us an idea of how well they can learn.

For example, horses are much better at learning to be comfortable with a new environment.

They may be nervous at first in a new and confusing place, but with some help they can learn to calm down and be comfortable.

Cows, on the other hand, are more indifferent to their surroundings in general, meaning they pay less attention, and in directly stressful scenarios, they won’t really learn to get used to it.

Finally, the ability to learn.

Horses seem to display a much greater ability to determine and evaluate situations, and adjust their behavior.

Indeed, they can even retain this memory for longer.

Cows don’t retain this information for very long.

So, which is smarter then?

Is a horse or a cow smarter?

The scientific data certainly seems to err on the side of the horses.

They have larger brains, more adaptive and reactive temperaments, and a much higher ability to learn.

Cows are generally more indifferent and care free, paying very little attention to their surroundings, or to humans trying to teach them things.

Both cows and horses are herd animals, but the individual spark seems to burn much brighter in horses.

Individual horses have the cognitive capacity to react to situations on their own, and use their brains to retain information on how to deal with certain stresses or situations.

Cows, on the other hand, have a stronger herd mentality, and often the actions of the individual are more determined by the whole.

Horses of course have strong herd mentality too, but not as strong as horses.

Cows seem to act more as a single collective.

Individual cows, it seems, are just more indifferent than horses.

Horses have a need to understand and evaluate their situations, whereas cows are happy to just graze and not worry about it as much.

Maybe you’d think that does make them smarter in a different way!

Ultimately, if I want to give an answer to this question, I would have to say the simplest answer is that horses are smarter than cows.

Cows, however, are quite happy doing what they do. So, what about emotional intelligence?

Are horses emotionally smarter than cows?

This is, doubtless the most subjective question to answer.

Emotional intelligence is virtually entirely subjective without reducing it to scientific and clinical terms, virtually depriving it of all its meaning.

The fact is, individual animals will have different emotional temperaments.

Horses, on the whole, are more inclined to build a more complex social relationship with a human or with other horses, for any number of reasons.

That said, many individual cows are much more emotionally available than many horses.

So, the fact is, there isn’t as much of a straight answer to this one.

I suppose in a way you could say that horses have a higher capacity for emotional intelligence, but they don’t always make use of it.

So, for many people, the question would be subjective to begin with.

They’ve known their relationships with their cows and seen the twinkle in a cow’s eye to tell them all they know about the animal’s intelligence.

However, on the closest we can get to an objective, scientific metric of intelligence in animals, horses do appear to come out on top.

For a few obvious reasons like training and ability to learn commands, but also on the level of the bonds they tend to build with owners.