To date there have been few studies on equine personality, with many equine studies on individual differences focussing on the measurement of temperament. Personality is defined by Pervin and John (1997, ) as “Those characteristics of the person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving” and is different to temperament in that it has a greater emphasis on social aspects of behaviour. Interest in this area of research has recently increased, which could be attributed to the potential implementation of personality assessment in management practices, welfare issues and potential applications in equine veterinary medicine (Mills, 1998).

Assessment of animal personality often involves using human raters to assess the personality of animals familiar to them. In order to demonstrate reliable personality data three criteria should be met, these are as follows; 1) assessments made by independent observers must agree with one another, 2) these assessments must predict behaviours and real-world outcomes and 3) observer ratings must be shown to reflect genuine attributes of the individual rated and not just the observers’ implicit theories about personality (Kenrick and Funder, 1988; Gosling and Vazire, 2002).