Clever Hans — The Horse That Could Count

Erik Brown
Lessons from History
7 min readApr 12, 2019

--

Clever Hans Performing — Karl Krall [Public domain] / wikipedia commons

Many pet owners claim their loved animal is brilliant. Their skills vary from the mundane to the extrasensory.

Now, what if I told you that there was a historical case of a horse that could count and do various forms of arithmetic? The horse could also spell out answers, identify dates on…

--

--