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A horse in the house

It is easy to understand why Patty Cooper is very attached to her miniature horse, Earl, which is 81 cm tall and has a fluffy black and white coat. Except that Ms Cooper lives in an apartment in Vermont and the owners of the building have denied her request to keep the horse indoors, in a stall she has constructed in her living room.

Ms Cooper, 50, has coeliac disease, which can cause brittle bones, and uses a wheelchair a lot of the time. She is hoping to train her horse to pull her wheelchair; it is also, apparently, house-trained. However, the agency said it was concerned about “dung, hay storage and lack of grazing space.”

So can you keep a miniature horse in a house? “We can’t keep ours out of the house,” says Lindy Woodhouse, who breeds miniature horses at her stud farm in Berkshire, west of London, (she currently has 26). “They are hilarious. They wander around the house like a dog and will curl up in the dog basket, or have a lie down in the kitchen. They have the most amazing temperament — ours will lie on the laps of children. But they can’t actually live in a house. They are a grazing animal and they need plenty of hay to keep their teeth in good shape. Then there is the mess.”

Miniature horses are also increasingly being used as guide animals for the visually challenged. They have excellent eyesight and take about the same amount of time to train as a dog, but can live for up to 35 years. In America, where there are several working guide horses, they can even travel on planes with their owners. According to the American Guide Horse Foundation, they need fresh air, as they are susceptible to respiratory illnesses if they are kept in a stuffy house.

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