«
»

Hair on Horse's Head Could Predict Whether Lefty or Righty

This article is part of Nature’s premium content.

Published online 24 November 2008 |Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1252

The hair on a horse’s head could predict whether it is left- or right-hoofed.

John Whitfield

Whether the hair on a horse’s head curls around clockwise or anticlockwise can tell you whether it is right- or left-hoofed, say researchers in the Republic of Ireland. Clues to which direction a horse favours could help trainers produce animals that run straighter and — perhaps — win more races.

To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).

Comments

If you find something abusive or inappropriate or which does not otherwise comply with our Terms or Community Guidelines, please select the relevant ‘Report this comment’ link.

Comments on this thread are vetted after posting.

  • #5337

    SirI am a trampoline instructor. almost the first thing I do when I get a beginner is to find out if he or she is turning left or right. The easiest way to find the turning direction is to stand behind the person, call their name and see which way they turn (when they don’t know what your’e up to). Typically if someone turns in the right direction they will turn the whole body at once, However some pupils seem to turn just as well both ways. I don’t know if that is an effect of training or if it’s hardwired in the organism.Kind regards Lotta R. Sweden

  • #5347

    This article is not well written. (1) The most obvious problem is that the number of horses classified as right or left hoofed sums to 199, while the total mentioned is 219. what happened to the other 20?(2) more serious is that the piece of information of interest is whether the direction of hair whorls is a good predictor of whether a horse is left or right hoofed. The way the data are described, we instead find out how accurately a horse’s hoofedness predicts the direction of its hair whorls. This article ought to have stated not that 75% of L.H. horses have anti-clockwise hair whorl while 67% of R.H. horses have clockwise whorls, but that 72% of horses with anti-clockwise hair whorls are left hoofed, while 71% of those with clockwise hair whorls are right hoofed.
    (3) Finally, mention might have been made of the chi-square statistic (p-value=0.000, assuming that the sample is random).As it is, the story requires the reader to do a great deal of work to figure out what this means. what does it mean? The direction of the hair whorl is correlated with hoofedness, but not so strongly that other factors can be ignored. Predictions of hoofedness based on the direction of hair whorl alone will be mistaken somewhere between one quarter and one third of the time.

  • #5353

    I used to race standardbreds and we have a old saying ….that a horse that has whorls is an extremely intelligent horse, and I found that very true. it included riding horses too.

  • #5447
  • #5448

    As interesting as this article about handedness in horses is, it ignores the behavioural conditions imposed or horses by the tradidion of always leading horses from the left side while handling. in thirty years of handling horses and dealing with the training of young horses I’ve seen handedness {sidedness by some accounts} change dramatically in a number of horses most suited to be handled from the ‘wrong’ i.e. the right side. it seems to me that the effect of tradional handling must be addressed before any consistent conclusions are made

Hair on Horse's Head could Predict Whether Lefty or Righty

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under running trainers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.