For a couple of years, I had the same two horses living on my track – a mare called Melody and a gelding pony called Beau. The gelding was here first and was dominant over the mare. He would push her off her food and corner her if the mood took him. He never hurt her, but he made it clear who was running the show.
Recently, we lost Beau and, as a short-term measure, I’ve been lent another gelding pony called Cookie to keep Melody company.
The loan pony Cookie is quite timid by nature and, even though the mare is too, she has assumed the dominant position – pushing him off his food, flattening her ears at him when he tries to pass, and generally throwing her weight around.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. When the previous gelding Beau first arrived nine years ago, he was at the bottom of the pecking order and the mare who was here then, Daisy, did the same to him. Before that, when Daisy was a weanling, the mare who was here at the time, Maddie – who was just as timid as Melody – was awful to baby Daisy for the first six months at least. After that, she and Daisy lived together as a pair for seven years and she was always the dominant one in the relationship, even though Daisy was by nature a much more confident horse. I’ve often wondered whether when you’re the new guy on the property, if the subservient role is usually the default one?
When I see one horse bossing another around, I always feel bad for the one on the receiving end. But for horses who are well socialised and understand herd dynamics, I suspect (but obviously can have no way of knowing for sure) that they don’t feel that way about it. As long as they’re not getting hurt or kept away from food altogether, they seem to have a fairly zen attitude to their place in the world.
In the wild, things can be a lot worse for those at the bottom of the pile, because there’s nobody to intervene on their behalf – and when you’ve seen it up close, the kind of violence that’s part of the natural order of things can be quite confronting.
Maybe it’s because the majority of horse owners are now women, or maybe because we’ve all come such a long way from accepting savage brutality as a normal part of nature – but in some cases I wonder whether our human sensibilities are causing more horses than necessary to live isolated lives. I often hear of people keeping horses on their own in a paddock because of social issues like this. I’m not saying that’s the wrong thing to do – I’m just saying it’s possibly a subjective call, and one that the horse doesn’t always get a say in.
I’m all in favour of horses having someone to advocate for them, and for them to have the best possible life in the context of a human world – but if they could talk, I’d genuinely love to know what they’d have to say about it. Would you?