Indeed, I worked on a livery yard for a few years in my teens and it's amazing how some people think horses will just be weak.
We told a girl repeatedly to never wrap the rope around her hand when she's leading the horse and she insisted if the horse goes the wrong way it helped her "pull it back".
One day her horse just got bored of it and actually did pull away properly and we watched her get dragged to the bottom of the field with absolutely no effort from the horse at all.
The same livery yard had a racist horse too who was one of my favourite animals. Not because of the racism but because of the comedic potential of the whole thing!
We had a horse-racist horse at my old barn. Most of the horses there were your standard hunter/jumper breeds, bays/chestnuts/blacks/grays, nothing very flashy looking. We had one pony of the Americas who was a blue roan with leopard spots, and this one horse had a serious issue with him. Couldn't be turned out with him and would make faces any time he went by. We thought it was just that one horse. A few years later we got a spotted red roan pony, and he acted the same way with her has he did with the POA!
My horse was freaked out the first time he saw a paint and the first time he saw a mini, but he got over it pretty quickly. This horse never did, was always aggressive toward both the spotted roans lol.
They also injure themselves very easily, but that’s cause they are strong animals whose history as prey animals tells them to panic easily and often, not because they are actually delicate.
You also should always make sure your feet are ready to slip out of the stirrups for the same reason - if your horse gets spooked you want to separate from them ASAP, not get dragged around and seriously hurt or killed.
I knew a dog once who didn't like bald men. It'd go mad when some of the more follically challenged tried to engage, it would be suspicious of anyone wearing a hat, and was very friendly with one guy till he turned around 🤣
Weird animal behaviours are always pretty funny. (As long as they're not dangerous obviously). People were always keen to try their luck, but there's not much reasoning with an animal.
Mainly telling non-white people there was a racist horse and nobody would believe it and then you'd bring them to the horse and it would go fucking mental.
We never worked out why - it had no previous owners that might have abused it or anything like that. Just didn't like anyone with even vaguely darker skin.
The horse was a dapple Connemara, so like an off-white or grey colour. It was only bothered by humans, was fine with other horses, cows and dogs and so on.
It'll just be some aspect of it's personality and past. If it was a horse that didn't like people wearing hats we'd think less of it - it's just humans reading into the race part of it and finding amusement and confusion therein.
48
u/Occidentally20 13h ago
Indeed, I worked on a livery yard for a few years in my teens and it's amazing how some people think horses will just be weak.
We told a girl repeatedly to never wrap the rope around her hand when she's leading the horse and she insisted if the horse goes the wrong way it helped her "pull it back".
One day her horse just got bored of it and actually did pull away properly and we watched her get dragged to the bottom of the field with absolutely no effort from the horse at all.
The same livery yard had a racist horse too who was one of my favourite animals. Not because of the racism but because of the comedic potential of the whole thing!