Original Oil Painting by Shirley Lehner-Rhoades 12″ x 36″
As herd animals, horses are highly social and prefer to live in a group.
There also a dominance hierarchy in any herd. They will establish a “pecking order” for the purpose of determining which herd member directs the behavior of others, eats and drinks first, and so on. Within a herd, horses will usually break up into subgroups– smaller groups of horses that tend to stay clustered together without straying too far from the whole herd. It’s in these subgroups that horses actually have their closest “friends.”
These rescued horses live happily together at the Duchess Sanctuary.