Watch Out for the Fence

Story and Photos by Joseph Zahnle

My wife Barbara and I were having lunch at home in Orofino in 2013 when we heard a terrible racket  outside. Two proud-cut geldings, a Peruvian Paso and an American Paint, were fighting over three mares. This battle continued for three days and it was so intense that the horses damaged not only a chain link fence separating the house from the pasture, but a vinyl fence along the driveway, and a wooden fence on the far end. We began to think one of those fences would go down.

The term “proud-cut” refers to geldings that still exhibit stallion-like behavior, which could be because they weren’t properly castrated, or their testes didn’t descend and they were never actually gelded at all, or the procedure was done later in life, after they had learned to act like stallions.