My mare is a PRO at “the snort”. Whenever she’s in a mood, I call her my fire-breathing dragon, and the description is pretty darn accurate. I much prefer to hear “the snort” from the ground than when I’m mounted, that’s for sure!
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Dragon Snort=Stranger Danger! I’ve had many a hackney pony do this…it is usually followed by head and tail coming up out of the same hole in their back, legs waving at the trot past their eyeballs and absolutely no pull on the lines!(read I’m driving with spaghetti noodles instead of leather!). Always exciting!
Deer will make a similar sound. As I understand, when a deer makes the snort it is due to a sense of danger and it sends out a sent that will let deer know that something dangerous was in the area and not to dawdle there. Hunters say that once they make the snort, you have been busted and you won’t have any deer by your stand for a good long while. I would imagine that the snort works in a similar way, as an auditory warning and then a lingering scent to warn later.
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The entire barn did a collective dragon snort this afternoon when a thunderstorm rolled through, and the first thunder clap was very loud. It was like a domino effect; the snorts just rolled around the circle, as if each horse was letting the others know they were okay.
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My Morgans have had Degrees of Snort!
First Degree: Head pops up ears swivel forward, loud snort and immobility.
Second Degree: Head pops up and back over the withers, Ears forward and tips about touching each other, Ear splitting SNORT with tail flagging straight up. Immobility, with every muscle rigid and primed.
First Degree was when facing “danger” that he didnt fully understand. There is a chance of him realizing it is not going to eat him.
Second Degree was when he was certain there was a Very Bad Thing that was going to attack. Realizing it is not a danger is not going to happen any time soon. You hope you are on the ground when this happens - or you may be soon anyway.
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Oh, you mean this snort?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCrD_KgWn_70rLejY64mUQCWgFha6uv0/view
:lol: this is the moment this past winter when my new rehab guy went "holy S#!% there are cows next door"
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Oh yes, my mare has the dragon snort perfected. I don’t think hers is usually fear…it tends to come out when she takes offence at something (how dare the humans enter her paddock to adjust the fencing…) and then its full speed up the hill, back down to the corner, snort and repeat!
I did have it happen under saddle recently, riding up the street and she saw sheep (her nemesis). Decided the sheep were okay and then she saw the alpacas. That warranted a big ol’ snort, spin and attempt to hightail it outta there. Lucky for me her antics are easy to predict and sit. And once she has her spook she tends to continue on like nothing ever happened.
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That is the sound the neighbor horses made when the pigs showed up. Very good term, dragon snort. Snort, whirl away, whirl back, stomp, prop, snort, rinse wash repeat. It’s the WHAT THE H IS THAT!?!?!?!?! noise.
The saddlebred show horse, seen them before no big deal, the part saddlebred pony checked them out to see if he could reach into their pens to get their feed so he likely had seen them before. Those two were afraid of different things, like the woods behind the house.
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That snort could be in response to any number of stimuli, but the horse is trying to do something very specific by snorting in this way (which someone already mentioned earlier in the thread) which is to pull significantly more air into the nasal passages to “read” the situation.
If you pay close enough attention to any given horse, you’ll notice you start to hear them breathing when they have concern about something. An old teacher of mine used the phrase “an extremely high degree of focus” because the snort isn’t always in response to something fear-inducing. Stallions sometimes do this when aroused or excited, as will horses fenced alongside or turnout out with new horses. The degree to which you hear a horse breathing tells you how concerned he is about something - a calm, relaxed horse’s breathing isn’t going to be very audible, if it is at all.
But yes, it’s pretty much always an indicator that there is something that has intensely captured the horse’s attention and concern enough to where they feel the need to really get a good read on the situation.
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This is my take on it too. I’ve found the snort comes with varied degrees of self preservation threshold for my horse. Sometimes it’s just a snort and we get over it once we know what it is and move along. Other times, it is accompanied by a very rigid, quivering body followed quickly by a quick turn in the reverse direction in an attempt to get the hell out of there.
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My Arabian mare has also perfected the very loud dragon snort. I think it means, “Holy CRAP, what IS that?” She usually does it after an initial spook/teleport/flying leap, when she’ll freeze with her head straight up in the air and her tail flagged and stare at whatever scared her and snort. Thankfully, she’s not really a bolter and prefers to turn around and examine whatever scared her after the initial reaction. For her, the level of tail flagging is sort of a barometer of how freaked out she is. She can lift it so high that her dock can literally touch her rump. :eek:
But because she is an Arabian, there is the odd day where she just feels good and prances around with quieter snorts and a flagged tail. :lol:
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I bail too. It has only happened once with my current mare but no denying the fact that her mind was gone as well. In my mares case we saw something she just could not process ( my husband and 2 adult sons hoeing and weed whacking humongous weeds in our soybean field) They were a long way off and to her I guess the bobbing bodies, noise and sun in her eyes was too much.
Rather than bail, learn the one rein stop. It’s actually very easy to keep your horse from bolting if you catch them before they spin around to run. At the very least, it gives you time to emergency dismount while still holding onto your horse and you not getting hurt in a fall.
We came across llamas once and were right near a busy road. Letting go of the reins and bailing was not an option if I wanted to keep my horse safe. Thank goodness I had learned how to keep him from bolting. It took about 17 one rein stops to keep him still long enough to dismount, but well worth it since we were both safe.
The mare has a good one rein stop; the question in this case was what would happen after I stopped her. We had maybe 200 feet to travel up the side of the polo field to get further on our way back to the barn. So I got off of her before she bolted, and she ended up not bolting.
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A mounted policeman stopped to answer a woman’s question near me(near Grand Central station, NYC). The woman was oohing and awing over the horse, who wasn’t having anything to do with her. He looked at me(I was just watching quietly) and did a dragon snort and locked eyes and butted me with his head, clearly telling me “Wow, watch out, You should have seen what I saw!!)
Turns out the officer had turned up a street with a garbage truck that was being loaded that then they turned on the rotator (door closes and garbage is crushed).
Horse turned and headed back to home base post haste, officer unable to control him. Clearly he had seen a huge monster that ate things.
Dragons do exist and he saw it with his own two eyes.
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