Just thought I'd share something that happened to me yesterday.
I was riding out on my own and we'd gone about 10 minutes. It was horrid weather but I was determined to get a ride in because its been too icy recently.
Anyway, suddenly it went dark, wind became really strong and it started hailing really hard, huge hail stones. We were on a bridleway lined with trees and they started creaking and I could hear branches being broken off.
Suddenly quite a large branch just in front of us made a horrendous cracking noise and crashed down about 1.5 meters in front of me and what did my mare do??
She stiffened a little then strode towards it, touched it with her nose, then turned her head for a treat!!
I was so proud of her as it was still so windy and branches were creaking and falling all around us.
I thought that it really shows the power of training horses in a positive way (clicker training and generally positive reinforcemet) and teaching the learning set of 'new/unexpected things are good'.
Anyway, not very eloquent but hope you see what I mean...
Bless her cotton socks! Having ridden her along that bridleway I can imagine how proud you were. I was having an interesting one myself yesterday. Came across some absolute lunatic lab puppy, which took to running around Henry, under his belly, jumping up at Henry's head to nip it...
What did Henry do? Stood still. Moved his head sharpish out of the way of the jaws, but that was it. I was flabbergasted at how good he was - he was coiled and wanting to run, but trusted me. A few hands taller and he'd be a very valuable police horse!!
There just is something different about their attitude to life isn't there. Things can still be scary but they have the ability to stop and think rather than just flee (or be so shut-down they don't react at all)