Which is kind of baffling, because a normal 8-year boy has erections from time to time. Perhaps the question was intended to be “what is the horse reacting to?”
There’s only one way to find out. Plus, I would guess in nice Catholic immigrant families, they wanted to believe their sweet allegedly innocent daughter and likely nobody actually checked. But… it can happen, technically possible, just unlikely. Depends how close, I guess.
Well, Catholics are probably predisposed to believe in the chances of conception without intercourse.
Being a nerdy reader who knew how to work the Dewey Decimal system I’d done my own research long before my parents decided to have The Talk – there was certainly nothing offered at school. I got to the “the husband puts his penis in the wife’s vagina” part and wondered how. It was so floppy. I surmised something like a BJ – which I had not heard of – down below.
It was years later after pubescence was well underway and I was pondering why my penis got hard when I thought about girls when the penny dropped. I still had the impression that he would put it in then do something like urination only it was semen.
I used to have a cat who liked to snooze on my lap. But if I coughed, or even farted, he would panic and run away. Not get up and leave, put leap off, claws out, and run away. And I’m thinking, “you idiot cat, you fart, why does this terrify you?”
How close to what, exactly? Successful fertilization generally depends on a lot of semen with viable sperm being deposited in the vaginal vault surrounding the cervix. That’s a fair distance from the vulva.
Have you ever considered how awful that must have smelled from the cat’s POV? Like totally alien or something. What have you been eating, woman?
Plus of course you outweigh the cat by a factor of what, 15 or maybe even 30 to 1 if you run to the large size? I’m small as men go, and something 20x my weight is bigger than a full-grown bison, bordering on the size of a full-grown hippo.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m sound asleep in a comfy spot and a full-grown hippo farts in my general proximity, I’m going to wake up in a running panic too. 
Checking (in addition to being invasive) is inconclusive. Some people have very stretchy hymens which may still be present after intercourse. Some people have almost no hymen to start with, and won’t look like virgins even when they are. Some people have opened the hymen with fingers, or by activities having nothing to do with sex, and will also not look like virgins even when they are.
A woman walks into a cafe.
She overhears a bunch of males at the adjacent table while she is dining. “Let’s go with the easiest option. W-O-O-M is spelled correctly.”
“No, I’m sure there’s an R in there somewhere. W-O-O-M-R.”
“I believed it was longer, and I had a B. W-O-O-M-M-B-R-R.”
The woman has finally had enough. “Gentleman, the word you’re looking for is W-O-M-B, womb,” she adds as she walks up to the table. She goes away, the men staring after her.
Finally, one of the men turns back to the others, “Do you think she’s right?”
“Of course not. A slip of a girl like that, I don’t suppose she’s ever heard an elephant fart.”
I’ve had lots of cats fall asleep on my lap. This is the only one who ever panicked.
An 8 year old boy won’t know why he’s getting erections. Maybe by asking why the horse is getting them, he figures he’ll learn something about his own situation.
My daughter’s hymen ripped at a child’s 3rd birthday party, when she fell awkwardly on a see saw. She was sore, and I’ve never been so anxious about calling the doctor to ask for advice, but apparently that’s common, and he just said to put some petroleum jelly on it for a day or two
A close friend said she lost her hymen giving birth to her first child. The obstetrician mention she had to cut it to make room for the baby to emerge.
Yeah, varies a lot.
And there are some women who have plastic surgery to restore their hymen so that they can present as virgins to the man they marry. Mostly in certain other cultures.
But a human erection isn’t (usually) about half the length of his body (I’m exaggerating only slightly) and it doesn’t almost completely retract when it’s flaccid.
And you’re STILL going to encounter people who think they have to kiss, or any number of other non-intercourse things, to get (someone) pregnant, and they think that because they didn’t do that, there can’t be a pregnancy.
This is an eminently sensible idea, that I’ve never of before. But then, I might not have. Are such things common and accessible to girls/women?
I’m sure they are, especially to health educators.
(And I forgot to mention that one of my sisters in green said, “Imagine how many of these we could sell to the boys at school!”.)
When my daughter was 3 or 4 her gerbils had babies. She started crying. I asked her why. She said she was upset she missed the wedding.
When a pair of sibling kittens first moved in, years ago, they would flee every time I sneezed.
They got over it; I think it took a few weeks (during which I probably wasn’t sneezing all that often, so they only got occasional practice.)
(I miss those cats. Gone several years now, at 16 and 17.)
I never heard of such a thing. And I was taught, several times, how to do breast self-exams.
I did a real double-take on reading @nearwildheaven’s post the first time.
I was thinking of pre-pubescent Girl Scouts as the audience and so I parsed the “model of a female chest with breast lumps…” as various models showing the girls the stages of normal breast growth from flat-chested child to budding tween to full-figured young woman. Sensible enough thing to preview, since it’s a big, inexorable, albeit slow-growing change.
Then I got to the “… so they would know what they would feel like” and that’s when it got weird! So I had to try to reparse a couple times before I tumbled to “breast lumps” as in “cysts and cancers”, not as in “budding mammaries”.
Carry on.
But here’s another vote that teaching girls and young women what and how to feel for problems and how to recognize what might be trouble as totally being a wonderful thing.