Has Your Mustang Ever Tried to Protect You?
It was raining hard when I got to the farm the other morning, the kind of rain that soaks through everything and makes even small chores feel like a real slog. I put on a rain jacket, which is something I rarely do since I don’t like them much. If they get too wet, they cling. If they don’t, they make me too hot. I’d rather just get rained on. But that morning, the rain was heavy enough and cold enough that I gave in and wore it anyway, hood up and all. And of course, the horses noticed right away. What happened next felt to me like a small but unforgettable example of mustang protective behavior.
Both Lagertha and Floki were uneasy about coming in for breakfast, and that alone told me something was off, because breakfast is a serious matter in their world. I feed my horses first every morning, before feeding any of the other animals at the farm, or doing any of the other chores. Always. I want them to know they matter most to me. Other things can wait, but they don’t. Similarly, I expect the owners to feed their horses first when I take a rare day off. That reinforces that my horses are first to me, and no one else. It’s just a little quirk that I think they understand and appreciate.
But that morning, even breakfast didn’t override their concern. Lagertha would come for carrots, but only from a distance, stretching her neck as far as she could. Floki wouldn’t come inside at all. He stayed back, wary and unconvinced, and no amount of encouragement seemed to change his mind. Then I realized I still had the raincoat hood up. When I pushed it down, that helped some. Lagertha was still cautious, but she was willing to reach for a carrot. Floki wasn’t ready yet. He stayed back, watching me closely, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
In her “reach as far as possible” caution, Lagertha dropped one piece of carrot in the mud, so I went into the pasture to pick it up and clean it off before she ate it from the muddy ground. She dropped it again, and then again. By the fourth time, I offered that cleaned piece to Floki instead and let Brent give Lagertha another one since he wasn’t wearing a scary raincoat. She was definitely more confident with him that morning, for sure!
That was when the moment changed. Floki took the carrot, but instead of simply eating it and stepping away, he started pressing his muzzle against my shoulder and wiggling his nose back and forth. At first I didn’t understand what he was doing. It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t pushing on me in a negative way. He was pushing at the raincoat itself, trying to shove it off my shoulder.
And as strange as that may sound, I believe Floki was trying to save me from this strange thing that was swallowing me up. That’s what it felt like to me, and I don’t think I was wrong. It didn’t feel like he just wanted me to look normal again. It felt like he believed something was wrong, like I was being attacked by it or wrapped up in something that shouldn’t have been on me, and he wanted it off.
A few minutes earlier, that same jacket had made him wary. But once he decided I was still me, I believe his concern shifted from protecting himself to protecting me. What had looked frightening to him one moment became, in his eyes, something wrong clinging to me the next.
Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. Floki was a stallion in the wild for six years. Protecting his herd was his responsibility, his duty, and he took it seriously. That was his job out there: watching over his mares and foals, staying alert to dangers big and small, and stepping in when he thought he needed to. That part of him didn’t just disappear because he came into a domestic life. Now I’m part of his herd, and that morning I believe he was extending that protection to me. (For more about Floki and how he has shown protective behavior in the past, Do Horses Feel Empathy is a good start.)
That is one of the things I wish more people understood about horses. They aren’t mindless, and they aren’t numb. They aren’t simply reacting in flat, mechanical ways to whatever is in front of them. They’re taking in information all the time, sorting it, weighing it, and adjusting their responses. Sometimes that response is fear. Sometimes it is caution. Sometimes, when trust runs deep enough, it turns into something that feels a whole lot like concern.
I can’t prove what Floki meant. I can’t climb inside his mind and come back with a scientific report that says, yes, this horse was trying to rescue his human from a rain jacket. But I know what I felt in that moment. I know the difference between a horse being pushy and a horse being purposeful. I know how carefully he was focused, and I believe he was trying to get something off me that he thought was wrong.
It would be easy for someone watching from the outside to laugh that off. They might say he was just curious. They might say he was bothered by the texture or the sound. They might say I’m reading too much into it. That’s all right. The people who’ve really spent time listening to a horse know that some moments don’t need to be explained away to be real.
Sometimes love arrives looking very small. Sometimes it looks like a horse who’s frightened of your raincoat one minute, then trying to peel it off your shoulder the next. And sometimes the most heartwarming part isn’t that he was brave right away, because he wasn’t. He was uncertain and cautious at first. He had questions. But once he worked through that uncertainty, what came out on the other side felt like care.
To me, that matters even more, because trust isn’t the absence of fear. Trust is what grows when fear is allowed to breathe, settle, and turn into understanding. That rainy morning started with two horses looking at me as if I had turned into someone else. It ended with Floki trying, in his own way, to save me from my own jacket. Sometimes the greatest courage is stepping up to protect someone from something that scares you. Floki did that for me. He’s my hero!
And honestly, I’ve never much liked raincoats either.
