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Horse people are weird… or are they?
- January 23, 2025
- ⎯ Christine Barakat
I was helping a friend muck out stalls that other day and chatting, as one does, while we worked. I relayed a story about a horse owner I knew years ago with exceptionally specific demands when it came to the depth and arrangement of the bedding in her horse’s stall. I’ll spare you the details but will say that rulers were involved.
“Horse people are weird,” my friend observed as I finished my tale. “They sure are,” I replied, without missing a beat. But almost as soon as the words left my mouth, I stopped short. I stared at the wooden stall wall that separated my friend and me and silently questioned what I had just said. “Are horse people really that weird?”
What is weird?
I thought about people I know who have other passions and hobbies, and the stories they’ve told me about their groups and concerns. “Yoga people are nuts,” a friend of mine once warned me as she rolled up her mat. “You haven’t seen strange until you’ve been to a scrapbooking convention,” another friend told me years ago as we flipped through album pages documenting her latest vacation. Surely you’ve heard similar: Cat people? Crazy. Sci-Fi fans? Unhinged. Fans of certain professional sports teams? Don’t get me started.

What do all these groups have in common, beyond their alleged lunacy? We are all passionate about something. Whether we call it a hobby or a lifestyle, we are dedicated to something outside of ourselves. We pursue our interests with an intensity that becomes part of our identity, in our own eyes and those of others. That’s not necessarily bad. Without passions, life would be a boring, homogenous slog.
What we all have in common
But like yoga people, scrapbookers, cat lovers and football fans, horse people have all the standard human failings. And that means that our passions sometimes expose the more disagreeable parts of our personalities. We sweat too many details, get caught up in very specific dramas and furiously boil what we love down to fixations that aren’t productive or healthy. It happens.
As I finished up that stall, a second realization dawned on me: The owner with the very specific bedding demands was motivated by wanting the best for her horse. She was acting as an advocate for him, which is what all good owners do. Her heart was in the right place, even if her methods were a bit inartful. And that deserves to be called something other than “weird.”
So I’m going to make an effort to strike the “horse people are weird” phrase and all its variations from my conversations and inner dialogue. I’d encourage you to try also. (This applies even—perhaps, especially—to people who are in different parts of the horse world from yours: Dressage riders may seem weird to the roping crowd, but I assure you, they are staring back at you equally perplexed.) If we can cut ourselves and each other a little slack, barns, arenas and show venues across the country may become nicer places, and wouldn’t that be weird?
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