This is HF Jewel’s Cherry-Coloured Funk, aka “Cherry.”

Cherry was born early June of 2023 to Lexlin’s Jewel Cahill and was sired by San Cler Nazareth of Bellissima Farms.  She’s a chestnut filly that carries one Agouti, one Pearl, one Pattern-1, and one H2 gene.  Most of those genes really do not impact her appearance at all other than the “shorty” gene that she has that should set her up to be about 13.2hh at full maturity.  Otherwise, she’s indistinguishable from a standard chestnut filly visually.

Cherry was the second of Jewel’s back-to-back daytime births for us.  Late that afternoon when Jen had just returned from a business trip, our horse groomer stopped up at the house to let us know that Jewel’s water had broken while she was in the barn grooming horses.  We knew she was close, but daytime births always catch us slightly off-guard compared to the normal 10 PM to 2 AM births.

Cherry has Jewel as her momma, and Jewel is always the queen of her pasture.  This motherly influence helped craft a personality that was quite saucy as Cherry grew older.

I feel like I need to say something about dominance and hierarchy here.  I watch my horses a lot.  I get to know a lot about my horses just by watching them interact with one another.  When some folks think of dominance, they think of the word “domination.”  They’re not the same thing.  Dominance is a protective feature for the safety of the whole group of animals within a social structure.  Humans have dominance structures.  Throughout our entire history, there have been families that rise to the top of our social structures such as the royalty of nations and empires.  Even in America we have presidents that come from family dynasties.  Adams, Roosevelt (Theodore and Franklin D were fifth cousins), Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton families come to mind.  Wild apes, wolf packs, prides of lions also have pyramid shaped social structures.  Having raised a lot of chickens, we see this in our flocks.  For chickens, it’s called “the pecking order,” and it’s a real thing.  There’s always one chicken at the top of the structure.  This chicken is allowed to peck any other chicken (usually in the face) without fear of retribution.  Below that chicken, there is a second chicken that can peck any other chicken other than the top chicken.  So on and so on down the line until you get to the bottom chicken (who, unfortunately, gets the tar beat out of them daily and who usually flees from all other chickens for self-preservation…it’s important to give them enough space to be able to flee to safety when required).

Horses in herds have the same thing.  This social hierarchy protects the herd by keeping unnecessary conflict down to a minimum.  If everyone knows their place in the structure, peace prevails, and the preservation of the species is enforced by fostering cooperation instead of competition and conflict.

If you want to know something about your horses’ social structure, feed them as a group in separate feeders.  The horse that gets to eat first 9 times out of 10 is the dominant horse in your pasture, and so on down the line.  With horses, though, we have found that there are sometimes friendships between individual horses that share a similar space in the hierarchy.  Because they are friends, they do not compete with one another for their place in the hierarchy, and they are equals in the tiered system.

I need to reel this in, because I could go on and on about this, but if you understand firstly that horses are heavily weighted to the flee instinct versus fight instinct (they’re like giant rabbits), the second most important concept that we’ve found for training and human safety is the dominance structure of horses.  He who makes the other animal move their feet is seen as the dominant figure, and that goes a long way toward training horses without the need for ugly traditional horsemanship methods.  We believe in natural horsemanship wholeheartedly.

This bears on Cherry’s personality and training as a foal.  This spicy little filly went into weaning thinking that she was the next “queen bee” of the pastures because of what she had learned from her mommy.  I have never seen such a quick transformation, though.  She went from a rowdy youngster with a Mike Tyson strength kick (the air and a few stall walls mostly) to the most compliant, friendly, and willing little filly ever.  She’s not even the same filly that she was pre-weaning.

Her first farrier session was a struggle.  Subsequent sessions, she was way more well-behaved than some of our other horses that are years older.  Overall, we have a pretty good herd of horses that mostly behave for the vet and the farrier, but even the most docile horses sometimes have their moments.  Some have more of those moments than others.

Back out in the paddock after weaning and initial baby training, Cherry has taken her place alongside some of the other youngsters in the bottom of the pack.  She still, occasionally, gives me a little bit of the “run away, run away” reaction for a few circles when I show up with a halter, but she doesn’t resist too long or too hard.  The more that you allow them to reap the rewards of evasion, the more entrenched that behavior becomes.  We don’t allow our weanlings to get away with that.  It’s aggravating when you have a horse that you need to move quickly that sends you on a wild game of chase for several miles back and forth across the pastures.  She’s not one of those horses, and thankfully we don’t have any of those horses right now.

Cherry was the second of our four foals from 2023 that were advertised but didn’t move.  Like Apple, we threw in the towel after the holidays.  If someone wasn’t going to snatch up our filly foals during the time of the year when good, quality fillies are the scarcest of commodities in this market, it just meant that there were no buyers for weanling fillies out there.  We refuse to compromise on price until you get to a price point for buyers that would be willing to pay for them at a cut-rate.  That rarely ends well for the horse who will either be flipped (best-case scenario being to a good buyer) or will be underappreciated due to the low price tag that you put on them just to move them.  Rock-bottom buyers are also often rock-bottom caretakers of horses.  That’s not always the case but it is a risk.  Slashing prices also has a cooling effect on the market for the horses overall, also, and you don’t want to be the farm that aggressively undercuts the market to the point where your reputation suffers, and then you find yourself on an island in the market all alone.  We already have enough of those sorts of challenges being in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tennessee.

Cherry, like her full older sister, Flo, and half-sister, Apple, has turned out to be such a sweet little filly.  We don’t mind her hanging around a bit longer.  Time will also tell what her future holds.  She’s going to be a chunky, hairy, shorty when she’s all grown up.