Cabra Park Stables

09/06/2026

09/03/2026

🐴 Twenty-eight horses were shown nothing but a photograph of a stranger's face, and their heart rates rose faster, and they turned their left eye toward it, when the face in the picture was angry.

The study was published in Biology Letters in February 2016 by Amy Smith, Leanne Proops, Kate Grounds, Jennifer Wathan and Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. Horses at riding yards across Sussex were shown large photographs of unfamiliar men, either angry or happy.

Two things were measurable. The horses preferred to view the angry faces with the left eye, and the left visual field feeds the right hemisphere, which in many species handles threat. Their heart rates also climbed more quickly.

The follow-up, in Current Biology on 26 April 2018, went further. McComb, Proops, Grounds and Smith showed horses a photograph of a person looking angry or happy, then introduced them to that actual person hours later, now with a neutral face. The horses behaved more negatively toward the individual they had seen photographed angry. The effect was person-specific, and did not spread to anyone else.

The horses had never met these people. Everything they responded to came off photographic paper, which rules out scent, voice, tension on the rein and any unconscious cue from a handler.

Do you think your horse reads your face, or your body?

08/31/2026

🐴 Every September, a column of veterans rides twenty miles through the middle of New York City — one mile for each of the roughly twenty American veterans lost to su***de every day.

The ride is called Trail to Zero. It began in 2017 as a pilot in New York and has since gone to Washington DC, Chicago, Bull Valley, Wyoming, Texas, Indiana, Kentucky and France. The distance is never rounded off. Twenty miles, twenty lives.

Behind it is BraveHearts, incorporated in Illinois in 2002 by Marge Tautkus Gunnar, with riding beginning in autumn 2003. It works from two year-round accredited farms, at Harvard and at Poplar Grove, Illinois, with about fifty horses and roughly four hundred volunteers, running lessons six days a week. It became a PATH International Premier Accredited Center in October 2007, the same year its veterans programme started.

Every equine service for a veteran or a veteran's family member is free.

The people who ride are not abstractions. Amanda Bethards, a former Navy corpsman, coordinates volunteers. Brandon Grodsky served with the 82nd Airborne. Andy Cumberland, Air Force, put it plainly: he can arrive on the worst day of his life and leave with a different mind.

Have you ever found that being around an animal shifted a bad day more than talking to a person could?