Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • http://doran.pacifist.net/ Doran

    They are playing two different games and I’m not sure either one knows it.

    • technogeekagain

      Agreed … Horse needs to learn to stand on his lead so the dog can’t pull his head.

    • http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell

      I’m not so sure the horse isn’t onto the dog.

  • snagglepuss_62629

    Dogs. God love ‘em.

  • Jake0748

    Pretty obvious that they are buddies and are just messing with each other.  

    • ldobe

      I don’t know if it’s obvious.  I have experience with dogs, and can see that the collie is just doing his collie thing, namely trying to herd the horse.  I don’t have much experience with horses, so I wouldn’t know what literal horseplay looks like.  What I see is that either the horse is just too dumb to resist the dog and not be bothered by it, or it’s being passive agressive and screwing with the dog by always stopping to eat.  But that seems like anthropomorphizing the horse, attributing that class of intention to an animal of which I have no idea as to it’s thinking.

      • Jake0748

         I’m not a horse expert. But there have been a few in my family.  Some of them do tend to tolerate, and even enjoy, the presence of other smaller animals.  There were some cats that would hang out in my sister’s horse barn and it seemed like they liked each other, and the cats sometimes had a calming influence on the horses. They would sometimes nuzzle each other.  Just anecdotes though.

        • Antinous / Moderator

          Why do I have the feeling that somebody is going to post a video of a horse eating a kitten soon?

          • Jake0748

             Bah!  Kittens would get stuck in the horse’s teeth.

          • niktemadur

            - Excuse me, do you own the Pit Bull outside?
            - Yeah, who wants to know?
            - I’m sorry, but my Chihuahua killed your Pit Bull.
            - Get the f*** outta here! Commie! Queer! Liberal! Make me laugh, how’d it happen?
            - Well your dog ate my dog, it got stuck in its’ throat and he chocked.

          • L_Mariachi

            How about a cow eating a chick?

        • ldobe

          Tangential thought: I’ve heard tell that sometimes gorillas like to keep a cat as a pet.  The idea originally was very disturbing to me (particularly before I dumped christianity in favor of logic and reasoning and skepticism.  The christian church harped on the doctrine that “man has dominion over the animals” and a gorilla with a pet kitty was obviously infringing on that dominion.)  I suppose anything intelligent to know that it’s smarter and more capable than another animal would be a reasonable candidate for enjoying pet ownership.

          I wonder if there are non-primates are out there that have an intuitive sense of pet ownership.  Perhaps dolphins?  or maybe two particular white lab mice?

          • Ashen Victor

             I cant wait to see a dolphin petting a cat.

          • http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/ J. Brad Hicks

            You rang? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynvewVe21Y

          • oasisob1

            I do believe that dolphin’s name is Ariel.

        • Kenmrph

          So wait, you’re part horse?

          • http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

            Not necessarily. There is another way to have a horse in your family without being descended from one. But I believe it’s frowned upon.

          • Jake0748

             No, just horsing around.

  • theophrastvs

    “..you just wait until you’re chowing down into you kibble, that bowl is going to be kicked into low earth orbit …wilbur”

  • http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

     As much as I try to assign some intelligent motive to the dog, i can’t see any purpose in what he’s doing.

    • http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/ J. Brad Hicks

      Oh, good, it’s not just me. Wasn’t that dog a border collie, or border collie mix? For a supposedly super-intelligent working dog, that dog was utterly and repeatedly failing at whatever it was trying to do there.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      He’s playing tug of war. That’s what dogs do when confronted with a rope with someone or something attached to one end.

      • rattypilgrim

         Exactly. There’s no “versus” going on here. Dogs aren’t as power hungry and confrontational as Cesar Milan would have people believe.

    • rattypilgrim

       He’s a dog who likes to carry things in his mouth so tugging as play comes naturally to him.  Obviously, the two know each other and are comfortable with the give and take dynamics that are going on. And as another posted, horses like to have their own pets: cats, dogs, goats etc. They’re very sociable animals. It’s a win/win situation for both of them.

    • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

      That’s my dogs favourite activity; grab one of the hundreds of part-toys left in his toy-basket, dangle it in front of someone until they grab it, and then pull until he’s sleepy.

  • doktorzoom

    “You could have just asked“

  • Kenmrph

    I found this very stressful.  The dog is all, “hey eat this grass over here” so the horse goes and eats that grass. Then the dog is like, “no fuck you! Don’t eat that grass, eat this grass!”.  So the horse goes over there. Repeat.  It reminds me of anxiety dreams I’ve had.

    • rattypilgrim

       Chill. Watch it again. They’re friends and they’re comfortable with each other. Notice how patient the horse is with the tugging dog.

      • Kenmrph

        Should I chillax? Or would that be going to far?

        • princessalex

           Whoa, whoa, WHOA!  Ease into it.  Just start with Chill.  Chillax is an intermediate skill, for which you need to have first mastered Chill. 

  • mrtut

    Lets us all enjoy dogs taking other beings’ liberties. They are such good pals about it. 
    Or, let’s be good masters and make them respect other beings.

  • http://twitter.com/badbcky Rebecca Bauman

    This is all fun and games until either the horse gets annoyed with the dog and kicks its head in, or the dog lets the lead go loose and the horse accidentally steps on it, quite possibly injuring itself in the process. (Horses tend to freak out when they step on their own leads and the resulting chaos often ends in their injury and sometimes even a broken neck.)

    I have experience with both dogs and horses and this was a really stupid idea.

  • http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

    I want to see a horse taking a dog for a walk where the dog keeps marking territory every ten seconds.

  • welcomeabored

    That the horse tolerates the dog is obvious. It is an established game for them.

    I watched the video and thought about the lengths we’ve gone to assure that our dog will die with all of his teeth – no extractions.  Playing tug-of-war with him loosens his teeth, since he puts all of his body weight into winning back his toy, so we stopped playing that game with him.  I was wondering if the dog in the video would get to be old (because horses tends to be irritable animals and kick) or would reach old age with most of his teeth after years of walking the horse.

    • zombiebob

       what, are you planning on a taxidermied doggie bust?

  • zombiebob

    That dog is a real prick

    • awjt

       So is the horse, and that snickering cameraperson.  Everybody loves an ar*ehole.

  • Space

    Thanks, youtube, for offering me some explicit horse mating action as follow-up videos, to wash the cuteness off my eyes.

  • BarBarSeven

    Worst Disney movie ever!