Looking for info about head angle from an expert in horse breeds

Post date: 2019-12-09 01:32:28

Horse experts, please weigh in: Do some horses have a different bone or muscle structure that changes the angle of their heads relative to the body as they stand or walk or run?

I took a photo of a New Forest pony recently and looking at the photo afterwards I noticed that the horse held its head straight out nearly horizontally as it walked. That seemed so different from horses that hold their heads and necks up at about seventy degrees from the horizontal.

Coincidentally, my wife was sketching using examples from a book of animals. On the 'horses' page that she happened to have open, there are two horses (no captions, just the images) and one has its head held high and it looks like what I might call an Arab stallion. The other has its head held low and forward, and it is drawn with a shaggy mane and a bulkier build and looks like an Icelandic pony or something of that nature.

I know there are different breeds of horse, but I wonder whether what I observed is a generally recognised difference in horse anatomy or whether I just happened to catch a photo of the horse in the New Forest while it happened to have its head down.

As a kind of parallel with allied species rather than different breeds, Red deer, for example, hold their heads up while Reindeer are constructed differently and hold their heads out horizontally.

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