WATCH: Escape Artist Horse Cannot Be Penned In
A video of an equine escape artist, posted on YouTube in January, has gone viral.
The clip features a handsome, Houdini-like Friesian horse named Mariska, who cleverly opens her stable door with her teeth, before padding over to her friends' stalls to help them escape, too.
The video, which has been watched more than 630,000 times since it was uploaded by user MistySandy, has received plenty of praise from animal-loving YouTubers.
"Omg thats amazing!" exclaimed user SuperHorselover55 in the comments. "That horse is so smart."
Incredibly, according to a January post on the Misty Meadows Farm blog, the nimble-mouthed mare -- who calls the Midland, Mich., farm home -- was not taught to open stable doors.
"We most certainly did not [train her]," wrote Sandy Bonem, one of the farm's owners. "[I]t makes life such a challenge for us. Especially as we have only to forget just one of the back up latches or chains and she finds the weak link! She checks constantly for a way out. Mariska has picked this up on her own over a period of time."
Though Mariska's jailbreak skills may be extraordinary for a horse, experts say that equine intelligence is far sharper than people think. According to Dr. Evelyn Hanggi, co-founder of the Equine Research Foundation, a horse's cleverness is often underestimated.
"Common beliefs maintain that horses have a brain the size of a walnut; horses do not think; horses are merely conditioned-response animals; horses cannot generalize; horses have no sense of concept," she said in a 2011 report on Horsetalk.co.nz. "In reality, horses manage not only ordinary daily cognitive tasks but mental challenges as well."
Mariska is not the first animal to wow the world with her escaping skills. According to Time magazine, an orangutan named Fu Manchu stunned zookeepers in the 1960s, when they discovered he knew how to pick locks with a wire pick that he had learned to keep hidden in his mouth.
More recently, a donkey named Frosty was dubbed a "hairy Houdini" by Mother Nature Network after the sneaky animal was videotaped turning doorknobs with her teeth in 2010.
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I have a Friesian girl just like that - Ulske used to have barn parties in the middle of the night until I figured out how to effectively clasp her doors shut. One time, I awoke at about 2am to see that the barn lights were on...I went down to see what was going on and Ulske had turned the lights on, taken the phone off hook, and let the shetland ponies and one other mare into the breezeway. Luckily she couldn't quite turn the door know of the feed room, but there was plenty of slobber marks on it to indicate she had the basic idea how to get inside. I had a big laugh and a big mess to clean up for sure. She's such a smartie-pants mare!
Lisa in Washington state.
hahaaha Hey!She just wanna have some fun.
My first horse, Mandy, could open the chain link gate that flips up and down with her lips. We had to keep a chain around it. A couple of times my hubby forgot to use the chain and she would let herself out and walk 3 blocks over to my friend Lettys back yard and visit with Shanna, Letty's mare. We'd find the two of them standing across the back fence from each other. She was a character. Marshasranch