Hair Patterns in Horses
How handy is your horse? I’m Jeff Keane, stay tuned after the break, I’ll be back with how you can tell just by looking your horse in the face. Hard to fathom but researchers now believe the hair pattern on a horses head reveals it’s talent and personality. Here’s Susan Allen with more on whorls and swirls. Jeff, horseman throughout the ages have used swirls or whorl patterns in the horses facial hair to determine their trainability and talent. For example, the clinician Linda Tellington-Jones discovered that horses with a single swirl in the center of their forehead tend to be less complicated than an animal with several whorl patterns on it’s face. Tellington- Jones has established her own method for determining personality traits using whorls not to discount certain horses but to better understand temperamental types. Most recently though, Irish researchers have discovered that whorl patterns can serve as a guide to whether a horse is right, left handed or well balanced valuable information especially when selecting a young horse whose future is pegged for aggressive disciplines like jumping, or tie down roping. The Irish study concluded that left handed horses had more counter clockwise whorls and well balanced horses had radial hair whorls. Susan it is also interesting that hair patterning in horses occurs in the embryo at the same time as brain development, those Irish researchers believe that fact as well could provide us with more keys to understanding horse behavior. I’m Jeff Keane.
