CT. Supreme Court to decide if horses are vicious

Today in Hartford, Connecticut the State Supreme Court heard arguments on whether all horses in Connecticut should be classified as a “naturally vicious species”. This all started back with a court case in 2006 when a father held his son up to a horse so the son could pet it, failing to read the sign that said “Don’t feed or pet the horses”. The horse, Scuppy, stuck out his neck and bit the boy’s right cheek, and is said to have removed a large chunk of it. Timothy Astriab, owner of the horse farm, had posted warning signs before the boy was bit. Astriab won the initial case at a lower court back in 2010 when the Judge ruled that the child’s father failed to prove the owner knew of any previous incidents of aggression by any of the horses at Glendale Farm. The precedent-settling classification would make horse ownership uninsurable and threaten Connecticut’s massive horse industry if the state Supreme Court rules that horses are a “naturally vicious species”. Connecticut would also be the first state to state to consider horses inherently dangerous.

Horses are prey animals and when faced with danger their instinct is to run, not act aggressively. That being said, not every horse is as passive as most, but calling them vicious? That just seems ridiculous. The fact is horses can bite, just like every other animal. I’m a horse person and I can’t count the number of times I’ve been bite.  It happens, but not a single one of those bites was out of aggression. It also amazes me that the parents do not take responsibility considering the father is the one who held the son up to the horse and neglected the sign in the first place. I’m baffled on why this case made it all the way up to the State Supreme Court. Can the justices on the State Supreme Court really expect to make the state classify horses as vicious creatures because of a family’s negligence? 

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/conn-court-weighs-horses-innately-vicious-20347259