KNOWING whether a horse is right or left “handed” may be the key to beating the bookies’ odds.
Horse trainers and riders often say their animals perform better when running, turning or jumping in a particular direction. But whether these preferences were the result of training and experience or an innate, underlying penchant for one side or the other wasn’t known.
So Jack Murphy and his colleagues at the University of Limerick in Ireland decided to measure how 40 unschooled sport horses, destined for show jumping or dressage, performed on a series of tests. The researchers watched which leg they…
