THE IMPORTANCE OF WHISKERS!

Hello!

Welcome back to GROWING UP TIGER!

Today we will be talking about the importance of whiskers.

All horses have whiskers on our eyes and muzzles. 

Our whiskers act like human fingers. We use them to feel the texture of something or to tell us how close something is to our faces.

See my whiskers?

As you can probably imagine, these whiskers are incredibly sensitive and play a big part in our everyday lives.

Now, some people like to trim or shave off our whiskers for competition purposes. it is the style in most types of horse shows for a horse to have a clean shaven muzzle. 

Example: Show horse with shaved whiskers
(Photo by Mommy)

There is nothing wrong with this practice. We can still get around and do everything we need to without them.

But what I want you to consider, is that by trimming our whiskers you take away one of our senses. 

Where we would originally only touch our whiskers to something, now we have to rub our nose on it.

If we are unsure if a surface is hot for example, we would usually touch our whiskers to it. 

This ensures that we can verify it is hot without burning our noses. 

Without our whiskers, we have to risk being burned in order to discover the temperature of the same surface. 

This might help you understand just how sensitive our whiskers are.  Lets use the example of Human's shaving their legs or faces.

(Photo found on Google)

When a human shaves their face or legs, their skin will feel a bit numb at first. The reason for this is that by removing the hairs, you also removed the "feelers" causing you to not sense things as easily.

Now take this feeling and multiple it by about 1,000 you now have the feeling of a horse without our whiskers.

Everyone is allowed to determine whether or not to trim their horses whiskers, but it is important to know exactly what you are actually doing. 

Obviously, we horses would prefer to keep our whiskers, thank you.

Lots Of Kisses!

-TigerLily