One of the more violent moments of a weeks-long Outer Banks feud was caught on video, when two wild stallions fought in a North Carolina marsh.
The brawl was recorded Thursday in the Corolla area and involved a young stallion doing his best to steal an older stallion’s family, the Corolla Wild Horse Fund reported.
Herd manager Meg Puckett called it an example of the “herd dynamics” tourists don’t often witness.
“The darker stallion has been with the black mare and her two-year-old filly for the last couple years. The lighter brown stallion tried to steal them from him a few weeks ago, but was unsuccessful,” Puckett wrote on the horse fund’s Facebook page.
“Since then he’s been trailing the trio, and will regularly try to sneak in and grab the mares. The first stallion has to stay vigilant all the time. It must be exhausting, but he is really doing a good job of protecting his mares from the challenger!”
The video starts with the smaller stallion kicking the older one to no avail.
A staredown begins, and the larger horse eventually intimidates the younger one into backing away.
“It will be interesting to see how this drama plays out,” Puckett wrote.
“At the end of the video you’ll see the darker stallion put his head down and move his mares away from the other one. This is called snaking, and it’s one of the few times you’ll see a stallion seriously bossing his mares around.”
The norm is for stallions to let “mares run the show,” except in those moments when there is a threat, she said.
Corolla has a herd of over 100 wild horses tended and protected by the nonprofit Corolla Wild Horse Fund.
