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I'm not a horse expert but I think a lot and watching horses interact with 
one another provides a great deal of food for that.  A long time ago I read 
that in wild bands of horses, those of color, greys, paints, palominos, 
etc, were generally shunned.  The theory proposed was that these 
individuals stood out from not only their companions but from the 
surrounding landscape and thus were easier to spot from a distance... by 
predators.

I have known people who anthropomorphize with a passion and I usually chalk 
up the coincidence of their analogies fitting the reality of certain 
situations to factors of which we humans are not aware, perhaps pheromones 
or micro movements.  Although horses have had thousands of years of 
domestication, the bottom line is they were, and still react like, prey. 
Ascribing their behavior to THIS fact makes considerably more sense than 
that they don't "like" horses of another color or that they are 
deliberately trying to irritate their humans or, my personal favorite, "He 
isn't lame.  He does that all the time just to get out of work."

Pecking order itself is a survival tool.  Wild horses needed a smart alpha 
mare to lead them away from danger and a strong stallion to defend them. 
By viewing pecking order as PRIMARILY a survival tool and only secondarily 
as a social skill, it is easier to see why a horse's standing would rise as 
its ability to contribute to the herd's survival improved, whether through 
experience or training.  I agree that as a horse learns, he gains 
confidence but that only accounts for how he feels about himself, not how 
the herd feels about him.  A horse's standing in the herd can increase as 
he becomes more forceful but it can also rise when he acts smarter.  It is 
interesting that herds are more calm when #1 is of the "good cop" variety 
than when s(he) is a bully.  Ponies are acknowledged as being more feral 
(closer to the wild state) than horses.  They've been call sneaky, wily, 
too smart for their own good.  If pecking order were always about brute 
force, they would never be at the top yet hardly any of us hasn't heard of 
a pasture whose #1 is a little pony.

Just some ideas.


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