December 18, 2018
Read Your Horse
This Douglas Lees photograph captures the huntsman’s horse expressing himself most clearly!
A horse walks into a bar.
“Why the long face?” asks the bartender.
Scientists at the University of Sussex must have heard that old joke and taken it seriously. They have discovered that horses are able to employ seventeen distinct facial expressions—three more than chimpanzees and one more than dogs. Humans, by way of comparison, are able to communicate their most subtle feelings by twenty-seven different facial expressions through our exceedingly dexterous facial musculature.
Horses, Hounds, Coyotes and a Modern Day Huntsman…er…Woman
Huntsman Ros Balding leads hounds and field of the Toronto and North York Hunt / Catherine Davies photo
Rosslynn Balding is sitting on a couch with her wool-sock-clad feet tucked comfortably beneath her. The professional huntsman has a bundle of handwritten notes in her right hand, which she keeps reminding herself, aloud, to refer to, but which she mostly keeps forgetting to check. She admits to being nervous. She has never been interviewed by a journalist before and is wary, in a most open, friendly way that, despite assurances to the contrary, I am an undercover, coyote-loving writer who has come to a 120-acre property, just south of the village of Creemore, Ontario, to blow the lid off an arcane blood sport.
