If you have hoofed, sentient creatures (centaurs, fauns, etc.) do they wear horseshoes? Or are horseshoes a compromise between cost, effort in looking after the animal etc. Is there something "better" (in comfort, utility, fashion) that sentient creatures would prefer? Possibly also a metal thing that's nailed in, but different in some way?
Interesting! I'm no expert, of course, but here are some thoughts that may help you on your journey. Take what you can use and disregard what you can't!
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Horses are often referred to as prey animals, but what are their natural predators?
Any large grassland predator in the biome, including humans!
This is an interesting question, though, because it takes in the axes of time and space.
"Wild" horses, the ancestor of domestic horses, are currently extremely rare. The only existing ones in a wild state are Przewalski's horses, also called the Takhi or Mongolian Wild Horses, which live on the Mongolian steppe. Their "natural predators" in that environment would include wolves and snow leopards (which are themselves endangered). However, it isn't an entirely natural setup; they were reintroduced to their native habitat after becoming essentially extinct, through an incredibly complex and fascinating recovery project. In the spacetime pocket in which Earth has wild horses, that's the current state of play: wild horses live in Mongolia and are occasionally eaten by wolves, but are being preserved fiercely for the benefit of humanity.
Meanwhile, we do have things like Dartmoor ponies in England and mustangs in North America and Brumbies in Australia. Dartmoor ponies aren't eaten by anything and are considered feral in the sense that they're domestic animals that live wild, but more or less on purpose, with the moor being treated as a common for keeping ponies on, and the nominal owners can just grab one if they want one at any time.
Mustangs are accidental colonists of the American West. They are preyed on by wolves, cougars, and other local large predators, but are not wild. they are feral because they're all descendants of European horses and honestly, if we aren't being sentimental about it, they're invasive.
North America has not had a native population of horses since humans arrived on the continent. The facts are often associated. It is commonly held that humans, upon arriving in America, ate the native horses all up. The typical line goes that "when the first humans populated North America, they were so greedy and invasive that they overhunted most of the local large mammals to extinction". but I personally - and in an unhinged I'm-allowed-to-randomly-hold-ONE-fringe-belief-that-I-Made-up-Myself way - don't like that narrative, and there might be evidence in oral myths indicating that First Nations people at least remembered contact with horses prior to European colonisation. At any rate, there aren't wild horses on that side of the planet any more. The mustang - the most classic "wild horse" in imagination - is not wild, but is currently preyed on by everything that WOULD have eaten the OG native horses of America, minus the large predators that have gone extinct since then (sabre-toothed tigers). Whether mustangs are a nice reintroduction that adds a missing element of Horf to the landscape, or agents of ecological devastation, is kind of up in the air. But they are regularly and routinely preyed upon by the same "natural predators" as the wild cousins would have been, albeit in lower numbers. Take-home message: to visualise how interactions of wild horses with predators and the environment would have looked, mustangs are a very good model.
Going back to the "time" element, human interaction has really decreased a lot of the "natural predators" of horses; they were once preyed on by a larger variety, diversity, and number of animals. In the pocket of spacetime when wild horses were common and had a large range, there also used to be a lot more things like hyenas in Europe and Asia. Here's a diagram showing the "prey animals" and "predators" of Pleistocene Europe. Horses are on the bottom shelf on the far right, at a lower opacity, to show they're "prey animals". You can see that there was a greater diversity of predator types, while today there are usually just Your Local Wolf and Your Local Big Cat.
But this diagram puts "people" as "prey animals" - and humans are traditionally The Natural Predators of horses. Looking at that diagram, you can see that the common, smallish-but-not-too-small herd animal, whose defenses are Having Friends and Being Fast, is a delicious-looking proposition. The spectacular depictions of cave horses in Lascaux are showing our kin, but they're also showing our food.
There is a very important Middle Pleistocene site at a lake in Germany called Schöningen 13II-4, with hominin remains dating back to 300,000 years ago (!!!!!) and it's called the Spear Horizon (for the incredibly well-preserved evidence of spears) but a common nickname is the Horse Butchery Site. One of the most ancient preservations of hominin behaviour, culture, skill, tool-making - their/our priorities, their/our methodology, their/our view of the world - is a narrative of eating horse meat. And the hominins at the Horse Butchery Site did it in a way that seems quite rapacious. Entire family groups of horses, coming to the lake to drink, would be butchered at once: Persistent predators: Zooarchaeological evidence for specialized horse hunting at Schöningen 13II-4 - ScienceDirect It seems like the hominins were killing a lot of horses and not using a lot of the meat, because they wanted fat, and horses don't have much of that.
At any rate, human-shaped people and horse-shaped horses have a very, VERY long history of us eating them. WE are their natural predators. And it makes sense. Humans and Equines are all social animals of relatively small sizes and have interacted with each other for an extremely long time. We have observed them, we know them, we grew up together. For quite a lot of that history, we had a simple relationship; we ate them. Now we much prefer to ride them.
Horses have not entirely forgotten this, but appear to have largely forgiven it.
I understand you're probably getting a lot of horse stuff rn so if you prefer to bin this ask completely understand, don't worry about it, but like, do you know where i could find out more about these horse customises? I've known about furby customisation for yonks now, and about miniature kitbashing, but for some reason I never considered that people might be customising breyer figures, and now i have im really curious about it.
(In reference to the Model Horse Post, where I added some jokes about a post, indicating knowledge of model horses. Many people interpreted me as being ignorant of model horses, and sent me lengthy and sometimes impolite messages trying to educate me - a person who is clearly more-knowledgeable-than-99%-of-the-population about the hobby. I lost my patience and did a Reading Comprehension bit about it.)
God don't worry! In the process of thinking through an answer for you, I started to frame something like, "there's a large and active custom Breyer community, many of whom are delightful people full of charm and whimsy!"
then I went
as I realised that the reason I've had all these asks/messages about that post is probably that it was shared on a Facebook group, or something, and probably captioned something like "people don't understand our hobby." Or some other framing that would have encouraged members of the group to come to tumblr and forcibly get me to understand the hobby.
I instantly went from feeling like "what the HELL is wrong with everyone???" and feeling very reactive and annoyed and jaded, to "tbf this is very normal behaviour from Facebook hobbyists."
So I'm tremendously grateful for this ask. Thank you! Thank you for prompting me to reframe this.
(custom breyer with added ethical taxidermy wings, by @thegreenwolf)
ANYWAY, Breyer horse customisation has been a quietly prosperous hobby since the 1980s, when people communicated about it with zines, catalogues, typewritten circular letters, conventions, and "shows". Much like early media fandom, it was largely the province of creative women and girls, although it seems to hold itself rather separate from "nerdy" stuff. (we're women! we make ART! we go outside!)
Breyer horses are artistic models made out of high-quality resin, hand-painted and heavy, with decent detail. They make good toys or collectibles, and are sensitive and expressive, with a nice balance of realism and admiration for the animal. I loved them as a kid because they weren't patronising. Here is a Huckleberry Bey, modelled on the champion Arab stallion, and a model that I treasured as a kid and still have (this one isn't mine)
The first level of customisation is to repaint it.
Then if you want to get INCREDIBLY serious, you could take that model and do a Drastic Custom, which involves resculpting the horse. Here's the same model of Huckleberry Bey who's had this done- they've reshaped his face and repainted him, with a different mane and tail.
You can see how the original model has been changed.
The next wild thing that people do with Breyers is go to festivals, enter photo competitions, and enter them into model horse shows. These are structured and treated like actual horse shows. There are classes for various characters, like breed, repaints, drastic customs, scenes, etc. Here are some Huckleberries being JUDGED.
Some of them are just for fun - showing off your collection and being graded on it - but the truly exalted people combine their interests in several hobbies, such as miniatures, leatherwork, dollmaking, prop construction, composition, teeny-tiny sewing and tailoring, and horse painting, to fully do stuff like this.
Everything in that had to be customised, handmade, or (in the case of the stirrups) from a specialty manufacturer who does teeny-tiny bits-n-pieces. The doll had to be broken down and reconstructed, probably assembled from a mishmash of BJDs/action figures and bad equestrian dolls (all equestrian dolls are terrible) and may have a handsculpted, certainly a handpainted, face. Her clothes are handmade. The saddle is probably real leather, and would be sculpted with actual saddlery techniques. Someone set themselves the challenge of meticulously hand-painting a brindle horse, which is an unconvincing horse colour to begin with, and make it look real. Not everyone does every single piece of this - there's a market for especially talented people selling good custom dolls and good custom tack; they have waiting lists - but you can see the fascination!
Then they take home real little ribbons. You don't treat it like a miniature convention or a model train thing or any other gathering of NERDS. it is treated like a HORSE SHOW. Because it IS a horse show. just with plastic horses.
(this is still almost entirely a women-only hobby, btw.)
(well, and kids. Kid's shows are also serious, but are CHILDREN AND YOUTH SHOWS.)
This super-serious, longstanding element of the hobby - and the constant birth of new horsegirls - means that it has a constant background level of energy and seriousness, and attractive success criteria. It isn't just about Buying Horses, Having the Most Horses, Having A Horse Still In the Box, Owning the Rarest Horse, or Acquiring Specific Horse From Blind Bag. All of those pleasures are too easily spoiled by someone with more money simply buying all the horses.
This hobby is about having people point to your horse and saying, "You must be Throckmorton! I thought I recognised your style! You've really captured the emotion."
(Winner of the 2024 Breyerfest "Fantasy" category. Breyer, as manufacturers, host a yearly three-day festival with a show element.)
There are many other points of expression beyond shows, but they provide a base level for agreeing on quality. Customisers often want to ensure that a changed model would still meet Show Rules, and model qualities are described as suitable for photo competitions (PSQ) or Live Show Quality (LSQ).
Some people do exclusively portrait horses by commission- standard models repainted meticulously to resemble the customer's horse. Horse People will think nothing of dropping a few hundred dollars to have an absolutely perfect 3D model of their horse, so if you're talented and good at advertising, this is a whole career.
(Portrait horse by Michelle's Custom Keepsakes. clearly much attentiveness paid to the spots.)
So that's where it came from, what it involves, who does it and so on. Moving on, there are some fun young customisers with social media presences that are breaking containment because the process is quite compelling. The horse in the OP post was being customised by DeeJayBe, who has really high-production-value videos and horses!
I think it's sweet that DeeJayBe's video about airbrushing (below) was found by so many bewildered older men who wanted to paint gaming miniatures and tanks, and were puzzled but pleased by the high-octane horsegirl energy and seriousness of a model horse artist. So many laborious comments from guys who felt they had to add, "I .will use this knowledge, to paint, A Train..I did not even know., that people paint horses. Look, at that HORSE. amazing,, GOD bless"
it's like. there IS overlap. but horsegirls are Girls Who Go Outside, so have a siloed model/miniature/dollmaking/customising community. Isn't that rather fascinating?
Here are some fun fantasy ones:
The Making of Kai | Breyer Model Horse Custom Tutorial
Here's one from StarBat Craft:
At any rate, if you feel like this sounds fun, you can watch a few videos, and maybe treat yourself to a really little paint-your-own Stablemate (1:32 scale, they're cute) for under £7 and see if you enjoy painting Horf. the effects won't be amazing with the provided materials, but you can Just Do Your First One and see if you like it, far more easily and cheaply than almost any other hobbies.
And if you mess it up entirely, you can repaint it. Or gift it to a kid for a still-nicer-quality-than-usual toy. Or sell it on ebay for someone else to repaint.
A nice thing about starting with decent-quality, pleasingly-realistic materials is that, even if a custom isn't to your taste, it never becomes plastic garbage. To me, that feels like a charming "safety net" under the artistic process. You can add more value, but you can never take it away. Someone, somewhere, is guaranteed to love and want that horf.
And that's ultimately part of the sweetness underneath the hobby. No matter how pedantic and irritating some members might be.
Further Resources:
Breyer's own blogs and tutorials: Customizing — BreyerHorses.com
