Was the bumper sticker I saw on a vehicle yesterday. Could someone explain this to me?
And, is it possible to have a more pretentious message on your car than this?
Can’t tell you for sure, but horse people can go insane quite easily. It looks like the equivalent of “My Poodle is smarter than your honor student.”
No. (Well, maybe, but it would be hard to take seriously.)
“My other car is a yacht”, maybe? 
I’ve got no idea about the horse sticker. The ways and doings of the horsey set are alien to me.
My mule will beat your ass? Well, it’d be pretentious on a NASCAR.
Think of it as “My Sean Connery will beat your Roger Moore.”
In my opinion, garygnu has the gist of it.
Classical dressage is a demanding type of training that can takes years for a horse (and a rider!) to master. This advanced training is taught in only a few places; the Royal Andalusian School of Spain comes to mind as probably the premier classical dressage establishment today. My late father-in-law was a big fan of their work, and of the breed most considered suitable for this sort of training: the purebred Spanish Andalusian. Other breeds used in dressage are the Friesian, Lipizzaner, and the Lusitano – all considered to be quite “high class” breeds.
The American Quarter Horse, in contrast, is more of a work horse, although it has racing quals as well. In fact, its name comes from its legendary speed at short distances; in races of a quarter mile or less, this breed shines. It’s a fine horse, don’t get me wrong, but certainly not considered in the same league for show or dressage as an Andalusian or a Lipizzaner.
So the bumper sticker is saying: “My [average thing] can beat your [really high-end thing].”
From my very poor memory of horses (learned as a little girl, forgotten by the end of adolescence) - (American) Quarter Horses are a standard, farm-and-family, rodeo, ranching type of horse. Nothing fancy, but they get the job done. Classical Dressage is, I believe, horse competitions involving jumping and trotting considered fairly fancy and elaborate, and would not be done by a breed like the Quarter Horse.
So this is kind of a “my pickup truck is better than your BMW” sort of an argument.
Kinda like saying “my '76 VW bug will beat your '08 Hummer”. sortof.
ETA: I like Bricker’s and Ferret Herder’s examples better.
The funny thing is, I think it’s supposed to be an anti-pretentiousness message.
ETA: What InvisibleWombat said.
I’ll take a guess at it:
I think that dressage horses are widely seen in the “real” cowboy states as pretentious, which makes this more of an “anti-pretentious” bumper sticker. Dressage riders around here are considered kind of like BMW owners; they’re viewed as stuck-up and showing off their money.
It’s kind of a “my horse is a real, working, serious animal; as opposed to your horse which is a fancy, prancy animal that couldn’t put a cow in a pen if its life depended on it.”
Again, that’s just my guess based on the number of people I know around here with working ranch horses.
ETA: Wow. Quintopost!
Could be. Western riding shows involve things that a working horse would do, while English shows (especially dressage) are very stylized. However English shows also involve hunter/jumpers, which is all about the stuff you’d do going after foxes, so that’s working also in a way. As a former horse owner, I must say I didn’t get it either. Maybe Western riders have an inferiority complex? The ones in my daughter’s old barn didn’t, and lots of the kids did both.
That is so funny, I noticed I simulposted with you, but didn’t scroll up to see the other three. How many is a record, I wonder? :eek:
The 911 threads had several posts at a time, IIRC.
But thanks for the info guys.
So, it turns out not to be a pretentious sticker after all. I’ll have to go wipe the goober off the guys windshield now!