>>>>Yes, they do take the safety of a rider into consideration.<<<<<<<<
They sure do... I could do anything with Dolly - the Percheron I rode to school in the first grade. I could walk between her legs pull her tail, anything and she knew that I was young and vulnerable so she was always careful.
She did have one quirk though - anytime I would go out to catch her, she would run off and hide - well, she always hid behind a tree that was about 4” in diameter and as big as a Percheron is, hiding behind that tree was ridiculous. She would peek around the trunk as though her whole back end was hidden.
She would peek around the trunk as though her whole back end was hidden.<<<
LOL.
If her eyes were not seeing you, then she thought that you could not see her......funny.
When my daughter was 18 months old, the jobs were in Oxnard, California and the only apartment that I could find, was a beautiful studio apartment, a widow owned it and it was in the middle of the strawberry fields, near the airport.
She didn’t want to rent to me, as she had an old stud/racehorse there in a coral/barn setup and she was afraid the horse would hurt the baby.
Debra was an escape artist and would sneak out, from the time she could walk, even taking a walk in downtown San Diego once.....
There came a day when I missed Debra, and set out to find her, we had made friends with a family that also lived there and they had not seen her, then I found her.
She was at the coral, pulling the grass that grew outside the fence and feeding the stud.
I swear her entire arm was disappearing in that horses mouth and she had slobber and chewed grass all over her.
I came running, just plain terrified and she turns with the arm in his mouth and informs me it is a ‘Goggie’, her word for a dog.
How that horse missed hurting her is amazing, almost 60 years later and I can still see it.
My son enjoyed that story, ROFL!!