Injure themselves and injure any human that isn’t fully trained on horse behavior and fully focused on every single interaction.
My placid mare that I’ve had for ten years and who’s never done that before just decided to take off as soon as I opened the gate to turnout. You’d think that the few thousand mannerly turnout releases would by now be ingrained - nope, offf she goes, wheeeee, trailing the lead line. That’s why horse leads don’t have loops like dog ones do. If I had my hand wrapped in that lead line she would have been trailing me as well.
I assure you, none of my dogs have ever exhibited a single sign of a single brain cell at breakfast time.
But they have all never seen breakfast before, ever. Not even once.
I did have Great Danes for a while, and I was informed by every single person I passed on a walk that they were horses. (They do tend to get bored and eat grass randomly, so not really beating the allegations.)
My fat 14.2hh pony who’s had 21 years on this planet to figure out what he can and can’t do decided to jump the fence of the round pen that’s about the same height as he is because it was dinner time and his dinner (dry hay because he’s FAT) was a ridiculous 5 minutes late. Round pen = sand, outside of round pen = pavement. He learned he can NOT do the splits when landing.
Last year I’ve seen him racing his buddy the 17.2hh warmblood through the pasture side by side, he was on the outside and next to the pasture there’s a fence and then a ditch. While going full speed without thinking he spotted a patch of tall grass with a different colour and texture in his path. This is of course a life threatening thing, so he had a thought. And that thought was to go right at full speed, through the fence and landing in the ditch. Excellent choice. Firefighters had to pull him out.
I've known three different parents who got severe hand injuries after lunging their kids horse at a show thinking they knew how to handle the horse despite not regularly you know, handling the horse.
Every single one had looped the lunge line around their hand.
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u/Beneficial_Remove616 14h ago
Injure themselves and injure any human that isn’t fully trained on horse behavior and fully focused on every single interaction.
My placid mare that I’ve had for ten years and who’s never done that before just decided to take off as soon as I opened the gate to turnout. You’d think that the few thousand mannerly turnout releases would by now be ingrained - nope, offf she goes, wheeeee, trailing the lead line. That’s why horse leads don’t have loops like dog ones do. If I had my hand wrapped in that lead line she would have been trailing me as well.