"J, someone was wrong on the Internet again. More than one person."
"How?"
"They said that letting children paint hand-prints on a horse is demeaning, dominating, and strips them of their dignity."
Horses don't care if they have colorful paint on their bodies, in my experience, they don't understand the concept of looking ridiculous/silly.
However, from Baasha, I learned that horses can feel insulted if you laugh at them. If I put something ridiculous on him he didn't care. But if I laughed, he crumpled and turned away, suffering.
J retorted, "Your horse rolls in the mud every day, proving he cares what he looks like. He wants to be mud-covered."
"What!? He doesn't know how awful (or cool?) he looks, he rolls cuz of bugs or whatever."
There are horses who despite mostly clean stalls will make a pillow of a pile of poop, they have no concept of how they look afterwards.
I'm sure that the therapy horse in the image was at best amused, at worst patiently enduring so many little kids touching him. But was his dignity insulted? I don't think so.
Flashback to 2005, riding my horse in downtown Seattle. My friend put a riding-diaper on her horse to catch poop. I said, "That's not dignified!" So I brought plastic sacks. Later, on my kneees on the sidewalk, trying to get the poop into the sack, she said, "You look real dignified down there.": )
It's what made my favorite part of The Horse and His Boy, "Do I really look ridiculous when I roll? I never thought about it. Do Narnian horses roll? What if they don't!?" The author really didn't get horses (proven on many other points) but I still love the vanity of Bree.
2 comments:
My animals (all!) know that "wear outfit = get cookies." That's the deal, and we are all good with it.
Maybe horses have a different concept of dignity. Fee now spends a lot of time with her tongue hanging out (no front teeth), which looks ridiculous. I'm trying to teach her "pick up your tongue" as a trick, but she seriously doesn't care about the tongue, only about the cookie!
Thank you for that: ) Oh no poor Fiddle. I was just standing next to Mag for a long while as he grazed today, amazed at his ability to take the top centimeter of grass off of each blade with alacrity. I said a prayer, aloud, "Thank you Lord that my horse has such wonderful teeth, still." And I said to the horse, "You're doing a great job. Get the edges too." I know that won't last forever.
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