I’ve been musing recently on where the old-style horses have gone. You know the kind I’m talking about, the rawboned, high-headed, ewe-necked, long legged, full-stampede mode movie horses that captivated the world when TV made its black and white debut. Or those horses you see in dusty photographs from your parent’s attic, with the names “Tom” or “Blacky” scrawled across the yellowed margin. The vintage horses nobody hears about anymore.
In today’s world of highly commercialized blue-blooded breeding programs, these horses would have no place. Based on appearance alone, they would be discarded immediately. They had huge heads, most likely from draft bloodlines somewhere in their lineage. Their bodies were usually rangy and long, they carried their heads high in self-defense against the style of heavy-handed riding of that era, and they went everywhere in a frantic gallop, at least on the movie screen. A far cry from the distinct boundaries of conformation in today’s breeds, these horses were just old fashioned riding horses, their breeding didn’t matter.
I have always been in awe of those horses. They had a look that matched the terrain they thundered over. They were trained to fall and lie still to stage gun battles, they endured being leapt upon from broken windows or saloon roofs, they could go from half-asleep to dead run without notice, and they epitomized the cowboy dream. Those horses could handle like race cars, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like to ride one, just for fun.
It always sent a surge of sympathy through me to see them jerked around and spurred off into a gallop in the movies. There was no “asking” or “waiting” for the horse to come around in that style of riding. It was forceful, rough, and fast-paced to cause more excitement, but it’s really no wonder the cowboy style of riding is given a bad name in these current days of natural horsemanship and training through “feel”. Those movie horses had to put up with a lot of poor riding skills.
I do think my mare Daisy has a little of that old-Western look. She is a registered foundation-bred Quarter Horse, but with this stiffness in her neck, she fits right in with the vintage horses. She really needs some work on her headset, and learning to give to the bridle. I don’t think the high-headed look was something bred into those old movie horses so much as created by the rough hands of the riders. So we’ll touch on that in an up-coming blog post: how to go about getting a good headset. Let’s do away with the old vintage look, okay?
