Which one is YOUR horse?

For people who haven’t spent much time around horses, it can come as a surprise that each one has their own personality and that horses can be just as expressive (if not more than) dogs or cats. As someone who spends most of my waking hours at a barn with over sixty horses, I encounter more equine idiosyncrasies than I can recount. In addition to school horses, both of my two horses have more personality than I do. Even though horses have somehow garnered a reputation as being proud and majestic, (which, sure, some of them think they are) their quirks come out the longer you spend with them. Here are different personality types you might find at any barn.

1. The Prankster. This is the horse you regularly see strolling around the property like he owns the place with a frazzled barn worker close behind. When you go out to his stall, he is likely to be on a self-guided taste-test of the hay bales you so carefully stacked the night before. By the glint in his eye when he knows he’s been caught, it’s obvious that he has no regrets and will absolutely let himself out again at the next opportunity.

2. The Hangry. This horse expects to be fed at the crack of dawn, sharp, and shows his intolerance for lateness by pawing, flinging buckets around his stall, and glaring at late feeders when they come into the barn. He is the first one done eating and will swear up and down that he hasn’t been fed yet. He will drag his riders across the arena to a single piece of hay on the ground and shamelessly chases his pasture-mates away from the best hay or grass.

Read more: The Academic Equestrian: 10 Horse Personality Types

by Chris McGrath

Hot blood. What, if anything, does it mean? Not in the sense that divides different breeds, as with German “Warmbloods” and so on, but within the Thoroughbred itself. Can a racehorse inherit a fiery or neurotic temperament, or indeed a mild and calm one, with the genes of its parents? Or must the spectrum of behavior, for better or worse, also reflect environmental influences on the upbringing of a foal?

Many experienced and respected horsemen are adamant that temperament can be traced through a family tree. Tony Lacy of Four Stars Sales is one. In man and beast alike, he feels, “the personality of the offspring is generally a result of their parents, and others in the genetic line.”

As with all attempts to reduce developments in science to some kind of silver bullet, however, most traits still have to be traced along a spectrum between heritability and environment. And so long as an elusive equilibrium must be sought between pedigree and preparation, then horsemen will still have to rely on their own wit and wisdom.

Read more: Equine Temperament: Nature, Nurture or Both?