My wife Maggie owns a male colt. He was in a paddock with two other male colts, one of which was a little Shetland pony, but the two bigger colts bullied the small one and their owners had to separate them.
‘But they’re all going to be gelded next week,’ Maggie said, ‘so they should settle down after that.’
It struck me as funny the way that owners of animals calmly accept that the ownership of testicles makes a difference to behaviour, in a way that would be highly controversial in the human world:
‘Bit of a power struggle has broken out in X, but the leaders are being castrated next week so it should all blow over soon.’
