Abnormal Hair Whorl Patterns Cognitive Deficits, Learning Disabilities, or Brain Defects? Part II

Note: Part I of this series, posted on August 12, 2023, under the title ABNORMAL HAIR WHORLS, is an introduction to this extended series.

In the early 1990s, I got an invitation to meet with an animal behaviorist at Utah State University while seeking academic support for my ideas. I won’t name the scientist who invited me to share my thoughts, but he was skeptical even before we met following several phone discussions we had. We met in his office for an hour before he suggested we go to the stables on campus to look at some of the horses. One horse he wanted my opinion on was his horse. We went to the round pen, where he had tied his horse with a short rope to a “snubbing” post set in the pen’s center used to restrain horses for saddling or punishment. He said he was punishing his horse for bucking him off that morning on the ride from his home less than a mile from campus.

All the same, you be the judge.

The moment I saw the whorls on his horse, I knew there was no way I could convince him that my ideas had any merit. Like a horse in these pictures, his horse had stacked doubles, one above the other. He said he rode his horse to campus every day of the week and on any given day, and for no apparent reason, the horse would suddenly try to throw him. On the days his horse bucked, he tied him to the snubbing post and left him without food or water for the day so the horse could “reflect” on his behavior. I asked him if it worked, and he said not yet and went on trying to convince me that, sooner or later, the horse would learn the behavior was unacceptable.

I almost laughed out loud, realizing that I couldn’t begin to explain his horse to him in a way he’d understand. He thought the horse was defiantly “plotting” against him and needed discipline like a child needing a “time out.” If I tried to explain to him that his horse possibly suffered from a learning disability or a brain defect causing the behavior, he would have laughed at me.

Over the decades, I’ve encountered horses with similar bizarre behaviors. As a farrier, I experienced every kind of behavior imaginable. Still, the most unusual were those with abnormal hair patterns like the stacked doubles, multiples, and mule-like patterns with a super low epicenter and streaks of hair running up the face. Although these behaviors were not ordinary, scientists like the USU behaviorists should know that horses can’t reason ( the action of thinking about something logically, sensibly, or plotting revenge). Yet, here he was, trying to convince me they could. The aberrant behavior of horses like his defies conventional wisdom and leads people to believe they have more mental abilities than they do. Many historical examples describe individuals with developmental disorders or intellectual disabilities who possess extraordinary talents, knowledge, or skills in a specific area. Take the autistic savant, for instance.

In one of the first cases I experienced that caused me to think that some horses could have brain defects or learning disabilities, a man hired me to try and trim the feet of a two-year-old purebred Arabian filly that had never allowed anyone to handle her feet. Always up for a challenge, I said I’d try. When I arrived, he put a stud chain over her nose, which made no difference. Then I suggested pinching her upper lip with his hand, which had enough effect that I could get a foot off the ground, but as I tried to work, she wasn’t still enough and repeatedly pulled her foot away.

But as I wrestled with her, suddenly, she went utterly still, and I finished trimming the first foot without her moving. I hurried through, and when I stood up, I noticed he had let go of her lip and had his finger in her ear, tickling her inner ear. Confused, I asked, “What made you do that?” He said he was playing around and trying to distract her, and she went still, so he kept doing it. I said, Well, keep it up, and I’ll see if I can get her done”, and I did.

I was confused and intrigued at the same time. The man said he wanted to train her to ride someday and asked if I could help. The filly lived in a stall all her life, so I suggested he bring her to my pasture and turn her out with the other horses for the summer so we could try to make a horse out of her. Over the next few weeks, he came over after work every night and stuck his finger in her ear while I saddled her and got on. Within two weeks, we had a fine-riding horse that stayed that way as long as I knew him.

The next bizarre experience I experienced was a horse with abnormal whorls that were not stacked whorls but one high on the right and one middle on the left with a flair of hair connecting the two. This story didn’t have a happy ending; it was tragic and unnerving. I was the man’s horseshoer and knew this horse since it was a yearling. The gelding was always trouble, but a lip twitch allowed me to get her trimmed, and I always went away with a shirt soaked with sweat.

When this horse was just under two, his wife called me in a panic one day because her husband was out of town; the horse had jumped the fence into her chicken coop and murdered all her chickens and two geese by biting them and thrashing each one before going on to the next one. As she watched from the kitchen window, horrified, the horse killed eleven chickens and two geese. Terrified because her children were due home from school soon, I rushed over, and when I saw the bloody carnage, I could hardly control my fear as I caught the horse and locked him in a stall. When her husband came home and called me, I said, “Are you going to shoot that horse, or do you want me to?” He sold him instead, and I never heard from them again.

I have witnessed and experienced more than a few extremes, but most horses with abnormal hair whorls never exhibited behaviors even close to these two. The Arabian filly I thought of as having a mild learning disability, and the second I thought must have been seriously neurologically defective.

I concluded that there must be a nature-and-nurture effect here. The man with the Arabian filly was a complete amateur and thought that confining his horse in a stall all its life was what a horse would prefer. In contrast, the man with the homicidal horse was “old school” whose approach leaned toward strict punishment for even mild disobedience. All I know is that both the horses suffered from abnormal environments that, as a behaviorist, I know create behavioral problems or worsen existing problems.

But it’s not all bad news with horses having abnormal whorls. My horse Jim (pictured) had stacked double whorls and had no problems, except that he was the most un-horse-like horse I ever knew. He grazed on pasture alone and away from the herd and enjoyed and sought out the company of people more than other horses. Jim was a prankster and would try to pick my pockets, and he stuck his tongue out at people like a clown. He was also my Social Ambassador because he always stayed with any new horse until they adjusted within the herd. Jim didn’t care for work and tried to avoid it; and he was more like a dog and followed me wherever I went. I sold him to a family with a 13-year-old girl who always wanted a Buckskin. They were a perfect pair. She wanted a horse pet, and Jim was her whole world.

There’s a neurological defect in humans called Williams Syndrome, a genetic condition resulting in various medical and developmental features, one of which is a frequent outward presentation of substantial happiness. I called Jim my Williams Syndrome horse.

Similarly to the side-by-side double whorls, I suspect it’s all in how you raise them. I raised Jim myself, and he never had any bad experiences. Still, if he had a misunderstood or abusive upbringing, he could have acquired multiple abnormal behaviors and might have been highly troublesome. But horses like Jim, handled with understanding and patience, can be fun to be around horses. He may have had a learning disability, but I never expected he’d be a performance horse. He learned to ride around in circles in the arena and go on trail rides and was the perfect pet for a teenage girl.

In part III, I delve into horses with abnormal whorls’ neuroscience and developmental biology.