Clever Hans the Math Horse

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What do people think of this story, about Hans?

Has was a horse that was claimed to have the ability to perform arithmetic and other advanced intellectual tasks. It was eventually discovered that Hans was reading the body language of his rather eccentric trainer (he also tried to train a cat and a bear). When people discovered that Hans could not count etc., he was just reading the body language of his trainer, they said he was just a stupid horse.

This upsets me, Has had a remarkable ability to read human body language, an ability that we Aspies find challenging - he was clever and people don't realize how important and remarkable the ability to read body language is. They take it for granted. I'm also damn jealous that a horse had better body language recognition abilities then me.

Here is a link about Hans http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=384

Temple Grandin talks about this at length in Animals in Translation. No, the horse wasn't good at math, yet not stupid either. However, don't be jealous of a trained horse. Reading body language is a prey animal's primary focus.
Human social cues are quite a bit different and that's the main issue with autistic nonverbal learning issues.

Yes. Those are trained readings, rather than being instinctual. If anything, it points out that an aspie can learn body language.

Actually, it's a combination of training and instinct. The trainers weren't intentionally teaching him to read their body language but that's how the horse figured out what they wanted. Prey animals are geared towards focusing on what we consider minute detail. This horse memorized the cues that said whether he was done or not.

Not just prey animals, All social species, predator or prey communicate by using
"body language". Sometimes they can read the body language of other species.

birds do it,
bees do it,
even educated fleas do it............