Temperament, Handlers, and Breeders

A Fell Pony stallion entertaining visitors

I had been watching a video of a horsemanship clinic. As the clinic participants were leading their horses into the ring, one horse stood out for his behavior. He had very busy feet, dancing around his handler, occasionally shying, occasionally pushing into the handler’s space. Often the handler had to stop and turn the horse around them to continue walking where they were supposed to go. A few minutes into the video, the clinician took the lead rope of this horse, and there was an immediate change. The horse’s feet quieted, and over the course of the next half hour, the horse was completely different. Same horse, same place, different person, different behavior.

Later that day, I read a post on Facebook about breeding Fell Ponies, and the author listed their priorities: temperament, soundness, type. I immediately shook my head in disappointment. This wasn’t the first time I had heard a Fell Pony enthusiast put emphasis on temperament like this. Of course, there is no question that we want our ponies to be good-minded. As a user of ponies, we also obviously want soundness. But for the Fell Pony breed, we must have type. It was distressing to see type third in the list.

Then what about that video? When do we judge the temperament of an equine? When the clinician holds the lead rope? Or when the handler does? How a pony’s temperament shows up very much depends on the human they are interacting with. It also depends on the training the pony has had, their age, how they’re being fed, how they’re being housed, the environment they find themselves in and other factors.

Then I looked at that list of priorities from my perspective as a breeder. I have found that rarely do we as breeders get to make such cut-and-dried prioritized decisions. We’re always working with the ponies before us, mixing and matching breeding stock to produce ponies that not only have good temperaments but are also sound and have good type as well as other characteristics that matter to us. It’s not one then the other but all of them together in different combinations in every foal we put on the ground.

Now, after mulling over the video and the Facebook comment, I am grateful for the prioritized list of characteristics. It’s helped me realize that there’s no way anyone can have a prioritized list when one is practicing the art of breeding. Yes, we can choose a temperament we like when we breed, but we also must realize that that same temperament may be a mismatch for a different Fell Pony enthusiast. Matching ponies to people is as much an art as breeding is!

© Jenifer Morrissey, 2021

You can find more ponderings about Fell Pony temperaments in my book Fell Ponies: Observations on the Breed, the Breed Standard, and Breeding, available internationally by clicking here or on the book cover.