Straight From the Horse's Mane

A strange phenomenon has been sweeping through rural Britain, creating alarm in stables and meadows up and down the country. Small plaits are being found in the manes of horses.

The plaits set the online forum of Horse and Hound magazine buzzing with speculation about who could have been out at night, catching sometimes intract­able horses and bothering to braid a few strands of their manes, an activity which at first seemed as innocuous as it was inexplicable. However, Devon and Cornwall police took a more suspicious view, suggesting that the little plaits were ‘tags’ inserted by thieves. “Similar incid­ents,” they said, had “occurred throughout the counties where horses are likely to be followed by the criminals returning at a later date and stealing the affected horses.”

The public was urged to be vigil­ant and to report instances of plaiting. Reports duly arrived from places as far apart as east Hertfordshire and St Just in Cornwall, while horse owners in west Dorset and Somerset were waking almost daily to find that plaits had appeared in the manes of their horses.

This particular police theory gained momentum when a horse was reported as stolen from the Guildford area in Surrey and then found abandoned outside the port of Holyhead, with a plait in its mane. But the initial panic this caused among some Horse and Hound readers was quickly followed by incredulity. One post pointed out that in an incident in Portardawe, Swansea, the so-called taggers must have gone through a yard, “past the owner’s house to the stables in front of the house, all without waking the three dobermans!!!!” Others wondered why these ‘thieves’ preferred painstakingly to tag horses with plaits when it would have been somewhat easier, and more reliable from a thieving point of view, to photograph them.

However, according to a posting by the ‘Official Horse Watch’, it turned out that there had been no theft of a horse in Guildford. Someone was simply stoking hysteria. In fact, there have been no reported thefts of ‘tagged’ horses. But the plaits are still appearing. What can they be and where do they come from?

Confident postings soon appeared on the forum, attributing the plaits to natural causes, such as the action of wind and of entangling brambles and such. Howls of protest ensued: no one whose horse’s mane had actually been plaited doubted that the plait was artfully and intelligently wrought. “My husband… spent a good 20 minutes trying to brush it out and couldn’t; the yard manager and I then spent 30 minutes unweaving it,” reported one indignant rider. “We were confused as to how it could have been woven the way it was. After doing all that, I still had to cut her mane; it was clear someone had plaited it”.

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