Horskies

It snowed, but was otherwise a fantastic day of walking past hundreds of horses. I know only a little about horses, but my mom knows tons, so I talked her into coming and imparting some of her knowledge to me. For instance, conformation. I can judge a beef cow pretty competently, same for a sheep, and I can get by when it comes to dairy cows and chickens. But horses, not so much. For one thing, I get distracted by how high on their heads their eyes are (cows' eyes are lower down). It's an odd thing to trip up on, but there you go. And I still get confused by their legs, despite the fact I spent an entire semester dissecting a pony cadaver. As soon as I try to think about the fact their front knees are equivalent to our wrist joint, I just lose it and can't even figure out the proportions.

So it was helpful to have someone along who was willing to spend two hours pointing out the differences between haflingers and quarterhorses, Belgians and Andalusians, pacers and standardbreds, and then quiz me on them. There were a few horses with really lousy conformation too (or so I was told), so I was gradually able to start piecing things together. I have apparently been mistaken for years about what "dish-faced" actually means. I think I interpreted it as being concave between the eyes, sort of "a la bovine", when actually it's the nose below that. I also learned that you aren't supposed to pet stallions on the nose/upper lip area, even though they twitch their lips and give every appearance of enjoying it, since that can give them bad habits that lead to biting. And I finally can make sense of an anecdote my mom likes about one of her horses that she described as having "little boxes" on his legs. I couldn't tell you which horses have "good" boxy joints, but I could at least tell there was a difference between the two morgans she was using as the examples.