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[RC] Sorting by colors and/or behavior - Diane Trefethen

I'm not a horse expert but I think a lot and watching horses interact with one another provides a great deal of food for that. A long time ago I read that in wild bands of horses, those of color, greys, paints, palominos, etc, were generally shunned. The theory proposed was that these individuals stood out from not only their companions but from the surrounding landscape and thus were easier to spot from a distance... by predators.

I have known people who anthropomorphize with a passion and I usually chalk up the coincidence of their analogies fitting the reality of certain situations to factors of which we humans are not aware, perhaps pheromones or micro movements. Although horses have had thousands of years of domestication, the bottom line is they were, and still react like, prey. Ascribing their behavior to THIS fact makes considerably more sense than that they don't "like" horses of another color or that they are deliberately trying to irritate their humans or, my personal favorite, "He isn't lame. He does that all the time just to get out of work."

Pecking order itself is a survival tool. Wild horses needed a smart alpha mare to lead them away from danger and a strong stallion to defend them. By viewing pecking order as PRIMARILY a survival tool and only secondarily as a social skill, it is easier to see why a horse's standing would rise as its ability to contribute to the herd's survival improved, whether through experience or training. I agree that as a horse learns, he gains confidence but that only accounts for how he feels about himself, not how the herd feels about him. A horse's standing in the herd can increase as he becomes more forceful but it can also rise when he acts smarter. It is interesting that herds are more calm when #1 is of the "good cop" variety than when s(he) is a bully. Ponies are acknowledged as being more feral (closer to the wild state) than horses. They've been call sneaky, wily, too smart for their own good. If pecking order were always about brute force, they would never be at the top yet hardly any of us hasn't heard of a pasture whose #1 is a little pony.

Just some ideas.


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Replies
RE: [RC] sorting by colors, Rae Callaway