Don’t punch horses…unless you’re Sid Caesar or Mongo*.
*Seriously don’t ever punch a horse. That should go without saying.
It’s clear that the horse was showing this emotion:
Not this one:
Know your horse emotions, people!
My guess is that unfortunately it probably means bad things for the horse more than anything.
I am relieved to see it was a child, not an adult. Kids do stupid things because they don’t know better. If it had been an adult, on the other hand, I would have been perfectly happy to see some instant karma (and hope that @TacoChucks isn’t right about what will happen to the horse).
That’ll teach her to pick on something her own size.
I can see her growing up to be a dentist.
Punching horses? No, the little girl patted the horse. Twice. The horse felt cranky that morning for some reason.
Not sure if serious.
Analysis:
In the first few frames you can see that the first “pat” causes the horses side to “wobble”, so even for a little tyke she struck with some force. She then tries to push the horse away (the second “pat”), at which point the horse thinks “hell no, I’m not gonna stand for that” and appears to haul her off her feet by biting her jumper (possibly the nape of her neck?) and hoisting backwards.
All that being said, different horses have vastly different temperaments, the horse could be a particularly cranky horse, or a “bully” - I don’t know.
Also the look on the little girl’s face is that kind of “princess grump” they sometimes get. I don’t think she was being particularly “nice” to the horse in the clip we saw.
uh… sometimes punching a horse comes under the heading of self-defense.
We all have much to learn from this horse.
…a Horse Dentist?
Good thing … I hope it hurt … a lot.
I have zero tolerance for people, children or adults, torturing animals.
Who liked to torture animals when being a child? Jeffrey Dahmer!
We need to see the video. Maybe the horse was a jerk and had been messing with the kid first? who knows?
Or a Newcastle fan
From my limited experience with just a few horses, the best I can surmise is, some horses are jerks, some aren’t, but they all are fairly intelligent, will watch you like a hawk, and won’t take bullshit from anyone. If I have a problem with a horse, or if I can tell a horse doesn’t like me, then I just give up, because I never figured out how to gain its respect over the course of a few summers working on a ranch. Probably that one horse could tell I was scared of it, and it decided I wasn’t cool enough to ride it.
I grew up on a horse ranch and spent a lot of time around horses. That’s an extreme reaction for a horse. Horses rarely bite at people – I’d usually see them biting like that only in a heated fight between horses. I don’t think that horse was actually used to being around humans, in which case the first mistake whatever adult might have been in attendance made was letting the girl in the pen with the horse to begin with.
The way the girl was hitting the horse wouldn’t have been anything more than annoying. I think it was the invasion of personal space the horse was reacting to.
Just an anecdote, not meant to disprove anything, but I’ve been bitten by a horse. He was an asshole, disliked me from day one. My cousins said horses don’t let go until their teeth meet, I’m glad they were wrong. He bit my back on the shoulderblade, and let go when I stuck my finger in his eye. Afterward the guy who ran the stable said that horse should have been in a closed stall. I was a kid, didn’t know how to recognize a nervous horse, and just waltzed in singing at the top of my lungs. All the other horses had no fucks to give apparently, but the one that bit me caught my eye and I tried to pet him. Stupid mistake. It’s the same horse from my previous comment.
It’s too bad horses don’t pay insurance premiums or deductibles, because I had to get stitches thanks to that horse, even if it was my cousin’s fault for giving me the run of the ranch but not bothering to tell me the rules.
By the time I hiked at Philmont in New Mexico, I knew how to approach animals and when to just leave them alone. We had to camp at an site called Bonita on the map one day. It was right up against a mountain with a huge field spreading out from the base. When we arrived there was a herd of cows and steer just doing their thing, since Philmont besides being a “high adventure” camp for the BSA is also an active ranch. It’s a special place in my heart. Anyway there was a herd of cattle just milling around, keeping an eye on us as we set up our tents.
Just as we wrapped up pitching our tents and getting our stoves going for dinner all the mooing wen quiet. There were a few hours of daylight left so we slowly walked out of the treeline single file one behind the other onto the prairie. Between us and the herd was just one coyote, and a single cow facing off. The coyote was just walking in small circles keeping its head down, and the cow was standing its ground. Every single bovine in that herd was watching that cow and standing stalk still. Eventually the coyote ran off.
That’s when we decided to keep a wide berth to the cattle. The rangers had spent the last several days trying to make us scared of the cougars (which they called kitties), but the thing with cougars is, if it’s decided you’re prey, you’re going to be attacked no matter what you do. For cows, if you scare it, there’s no telling whether they’ll run to trample you or run away. Their unpredictability is a risk itself.
In your cousin’s defense, it’s easy to forget that there is a certain type of knowing in a given environment that not everyone grows up with. Whenever I have guests from small towns, suburbs, or rural areas, I’ve learned to give a run-down of how things are done differently in a large city because they really don’t know. Not their fault, but I want to keep them safe.
