It's so interesting to me when groups of wild horses quickly shift from being calm/quiet to fired up and ready to fight ... and then right back to calmly grazing together again.

I'm so curious about the subtleties of their emotions and how they resolve things in the ways that they do. Sometimes it's clearly very serious and they are furious. Those disputes seem to revolve around mating rights, herd protection from outsiders or sometimes authoritative leadership. Other times it's just posturing, pent-up energy and even playfulness between each other. But even in the most serious of battles, the two adversaries can sometimes go right back to peacefully grazing nearby one another.

This particular group of bachelors was fired up on this bright and beautiful Friday morning when I arrived on the scene. Thankfully nobody got hurt and it wasn't the most serious of fights.

The main antagonist on this day was the mahogany-colored mustang. I'm not entirely sure of the proper name of his color, though. His coat is very dark, almost black with shades of purple/dark brown. There's a horse color chart with a wide range of variations that I should have memorized at this point, but alas I'll have to get to that another day. I'll refer to him as Mr. Mahogany for the purposes of this short story.

Mr. Mahogany was spoiling for a fight and getting nose-to-nose with several others in his band. I love his reaction to the the much larger painted horse in the first two images here (second image is just a crop of the first). The painted horse really wasn't in the mood to fight, but he wasn't going get pushed around by someone smaller than him either.

At that moment, the white horse comes running into the scene. But, was the white horse just jousting with Mr. Mahogany so that he didn't get beaten up by the bigger horse?

I ask that question because the white horse tried to dodge nearly everything and seemed like he was only half-trying... and so I'll call him Dodger. Only once did Dodger really flex his muscle somewhat, but he definitely held back in the moment.

Towards the end of the brief sparring match, Dodger could have absolutely leveled Mr. Mahogany and sent him down to the ground on his back. Mahogany was completely vertical and about to tip over when he regained his footing.

The last thing I want to see is a horse fall and get seriously injured. It was an anxious microsecond when I saw him almost fall, but in an instant the danger was over.

I almost think that Dodger was gently holding Mahogany from falling at the same time. In that moment, Dodger has Mahogany by the scruff of his neck, but Dodger doesn't rip away any skin or push Mahogany back.. he was just poking at Mahogany enough to put him on his heels a bit.

Mr. Mahogany immediately pressed his luck again as Dodger bob-and-weaved his away from the advances. A minute or two later they all ran north and began peacefully grazing for hours with several other small groups.