The Secret Lives of Horses 5 of 5 Part article

Most of the band accepted the young stallion. Not High Tail. At every opportunity she left her band and headed off in search of her longtime mate, Sam. Each time she left, Sitting Bull chased her back, snaking his head and baring his teeth to threaten her with injury. To avoid being bitten, she complied and returned to the band, but the next time Sitting Bull failed to pay attention, High Tail took off again. This went on for many weeks until the younger stallion gave up chasing her. “From then on it was just Sam and High Tail,” Ransom says. “They got their weight back, and at first Sam tried to drive Sitting Bull off and get back with the other mares, but each time he tried, he failed.”

High Tail stayed with Sam until he died in 2010. (Because of the stress of constant fighting with other males, stallions often live much shorter lives than mares.) After Sam's death, researchers saw High Tail with a stallion they called Admiral. Eventually Admiral fell out of favor with her. Ransom doesn't know why.

We saw High Tail one afternoon that July. She was with two other horses. One was a mare from her original band, an animal she had known for years. The other was Sitting Bull. Rejected by High Tail in her younger years, he was now one of her boon companions. Primate field researchers long ago discovered the ebb and flow of alliances within primate troops, but until recently no one has watched horses in the wild closely enough to understand that they, too, behave this way. I asked Ransom if he thought there were any hard and fast rules about horse behavior in the wild. “They rarely choose to be alone,” he replied.

This article was originally published with the title "The Secret Lives of Horses"