Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

The truth about Surrey’s obsession with horse masks

People cover up their animals because they assume they feel the same as we do

[Photo: drKokos]

A saloon car pulled up opposite our fields and a man sat there looking at the horses with a bewildered expression.

I had noticed this car meandering along the farm track, driving between the horse fields and stopping every time he came alongside a horse, sitting there for minutes on end.

Then he would start driving again. Then he would stop alongside another horse. For quite a while he was parked by the grazing fields above where the builder boyfriend and I have a smallholding, and was stopped staring at our friends’ horses, I realised.

When he got to our fields, he pulled up again and began peering into our paddocks, looking over to where the builder b’s cobs were standing in the stable yard munching hay.

What fresh madness is this? I thought. So I walked across our front paddock to the fence line next to where his car was stopped and I waved at the man through the window, saying: ‘Are you lost?’

He was a person of colour, and from his heavily accented voice, when he replied, I would have guessed he was quite recently here from Africa.

The horse-rugging craze is getting so ludicrous there are people putting horses in onesies

He said he had just dropped his daughter off to play with the children of his friend, referring to a new neighbour of ours in one of the houses at the top of the track.

‘But,’ said this chap, looking confused as he leaned towards me, ‘can I ask you something?’

I said he could ask me anything. ‘Why are the horses wearing blindfolds on their heads?’

I saw his confusion, if he was as recently arrived in this country as I suspected, trying to make sense of our customs and peculiarities. All my friends’ horses wear fly protection.

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