Why horses should be treated with respect

Horses are wonderful creatures, don't get me wrong, however a semi-autonomous semi-intelligent prey animal is not something to be encountered lightly on the roads - after all they weigh 0.5-0.75 tons and if that sits on you, or your car, the results are predictable...

If anything spooks a horse it will rear, skitter and/or bolt. That anything can literally be that - a shaft of sunlight, a butterfly, a car, a seagull, a cloud passing the sun, a tree waving oddly in the breeze or even a cyclist 200 yards away on a weird bike wearing a HiViz jacket... oo that will have been me then!

In this case I don't think it was me - they started to act up whilst I was a fair way off, however the piebald one did look rather oddly at me as I went past really slowly on the pavement... and, for some reason, I can't help feeling a little guilty.

Incidentally no one was thrown from their horse - though that may have been a close run thing - no cars or vans were crushed by fleeing creatures and no cyclists fell off their recumbents in the making of this movie.