It delights me to know that wild horses still exist, even if I’ll never get up to Alberta to see them. Someone’s been putting out food for them: what it is, I don’t know. We can rule out jello and steak. [Cameo appearance by a pair of grizzly bears.]
Mineral blocks are usually what they are fed, and if available, some hay of some kind.
I knew you’d know. Three cheers!
Yep, I’ve lived around these things off and on for all my life. I was always a bit leery of horses
but did have one or two that I really liked and trusted. My husband had worked with horses for years and in every way, including rodeo stuff.
Are horses ever aggressive toward humans? All my horses were toys.
I don’t know much about horses, but what limited exposure I do have tells me that they have distinct personalities and that some of them are not particularly friendly.
That’s domestic horses, and I would imagine that wild horses are much less predictable. Allegedly, my grandfather had a gift for dealing with horses and could take a wild horse with little fuss. That was decades before my time, and he never spoke of it, but apparently during his youth, he would participate in round-ups of wild horses.
Was he a “horse whisperer”? (I saw a movie about it once.)
Perhaps, but long before the term was popular. The story is, when he was about five, his father and his uncle were discussing a particularly difficult horse to tame, and he calmly climbed onto that horse’s back, and blew everyone’s mind.
There are people who seem to have a gift for communicating with animals. I had a friend who claimed to have trained her dog to look away while she ate. I was skeptical, until she watched my cat for two weeks, and trained him to do the same thing. Her brother worked as an animal handler having dealt with all sort of animal actors. I met him once, and he told me that the animals he found most difficult to deal with were bears.
I can read the body language of some animals, but not to any extraordinary degree. I know that the sides of a snake who is ready to strike will be heaving, noticeably. Of course, if you’re really smart, you keep enough distance from snakes that it would be hard to see. 🙂
Oh, yes, horses showed their approval and their disapproval in quite a few ways. They really do seem rather emotional. They can “cool it” if it affects their feeding though.
This is very interesting, and I know you know what you’re talking about. Anything else you can tell us about horse psychology?
Well, not much. I didn’t spend a lot of time around them myself, but one thing I remember was the way they treated little kids- more gently, and how they seemed to know when somebody was trying to get too bossy with them– they didn’t like that and wouldn’t put up with much. They would threaten to kick someone who made them mad.
Oh, one more thing I just remembered; one of our horses got tangled up in a little barbed wire and cut his hind foot. I didn’t dare touch him, but I prayed for him, that the cut would heal quickly and his pain would end– and it happened very quickly. Even the horse seemed to be surprised, and he kept hanging around near the house and making some friendly moves toward me before returning to the lower pasture.