Ponyplay

What is ponyplay?

Ponyplay (usually written pony play, two words) is roleplay in which someone takes on the role of a horse or pony and is trained, driven, or ridden by the other. It’s about posture, gait, and being schooled, not about companionship. Ponyplay is a branch of animal play and so stands beside petplay, not under it.

What ponyplay looks like in practice

Ponyplay starts with a posture you’re taught, not with a collar going on.

What gets practiced is, according to the encyclopedia, often exactly the program of a real schooling, only on two legs: walking, cantering, obeying a signal.

An ordinary evening: the headstall goes on, with a bit between the teeth, and from that moment on there’s no more talking. The other taps a short stick against your knee until you lift it high enough, and counts the step. A lap, halt, again. A dog may lie on the floor and a cat may walk off; a pony is judged on how it moves.

Where the word ponyplay comes from

Dutch never made its own word for it.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates powny to the 1650s as “a very small horse”, from Scots, by way of the obsolete French poulenet “little foal” and the Late Latin pullanus, the young of an animal.

In the Royal Library’s newspaper archive, ponyplay turns up zero articles and paardenrollenspel zero too. What is there is ponygirl, 105 times, and all but one hit between 1989 and 1994. The oldest appears on 27 February 1989 on page 16 of Het vrije volk, in an ad for a phone-sex line: “SM. Ponygirl. Ankie’s droom. Paardje spelen. Ze wil de teugels voelen en de sporen. Naaldhakken en nylons in de stal.” (Roughly: playing horse, wanting to feel the reins and the spurs, heels and nylons in the stable.)

For the play itself, that ad reaches for paardje spelen, the nursery phrase, which the archive knows 513 times. And ponyboy gives 35 hits that are nearly all about the film The Outsiders.

Why people do ponyplay

Because there’s nothing left to decide while you’re being watched the whole time. The tack sets the posture, the bit takes the words away, and what’s left is one instruction at a time: lift that knee, hold still, walk on.

• For the one who is the pony, something comes back that petplay lacks: you can do it well. The exercise is the arousal, and the approval afterward weighs more because you worked for it.
• For the one who drives or trains, the role is patient instead of commanding. You steer with a hand, a stick, and your voice, and read from the gait when it’s enough.
• For a couple together, it’s giving attention that has nothing to do with talking.

Physically this is the heaviest animal role there is, so no relaxation for anyone who wants to lie down. And it fixes nothing: someone who doesn’t feel seen won’t suddenly feel seen in a harness.

How people do ponyplay

Most people start with just a headstall and the gait.

After that, three forms branch off. The cart, where the pony pulls and the driver sits. The riding, where someone is carried on hands and knees. And the dressage, which sits closest to the core: steps and postures taken on a single signal and judged, just as in position training.

Rare, the role is. In the survey by Brown and colleagues, 195 participants named their role within animal roleplay: dog 31.3 percent, cat 21.5, fox 12.3, wolf 8.7, and the horse 5.1 percent, the smallest of all the species named.

Misconceptions about ponyplay

“Ponyplay is just a form of petplay.” Here the professional literature and this site part ways. Brown, Barker, Friedrich and Rahman write in The Journal of Sex Research: “Pet play has numerous subgroups, varying based on species (e.g., kitten and pony play) and intensity.” For them, pet play is the umbrella over all animal roles, roughly what’s called animal play here. I keep the distinction anyway, for three reasons. Under that sentence sit two references, and both are commercial blog pages, not research. The authors write in the same paragraph that the research is limited and most of the information comes from anecdotal sources. And their own questionnaire item names “tails, ears, and an animal collar”: tail, ears, and a collar, the tack of dog and cat, while a pony belongs with the bit and the reins. What’s left is a matter of substance: a pet is kept, a pony is schooled.

“You need hoof boots and a cart for it.” The work is done by the posture, the signal, and the repetition. Tack reinforces that and is never the condition.

“Horseplay is the same word.” On Dutch kink lists it is, in English it isn’t: there horseplay means loud roughhousing. What that does to your search results is on horseplay.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Roleplay is on my yes-list and we agree the form beforehand. Horse tack isn’t part of my standard kit, and I’d rather say that up front.

With the women who bring this up, it’s almost never about horses. It’s about the exercise. Someone who at work is judged only on results wants an hour where she’s judged on something small and unimportant, and where she can do it well.

The beginner’s mistake is wanting too much too fast. Bit in, tail on, and after fifteen minutes the knees give out.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on a signal that works without words. A pony with a bit in can’t say a safeword, so pick a sound or an object that gets dropped, before the headstall goes on.
• Put something under your knees if you work on the floor. Repeated kneeling strains the bursa in front of the kneecap, and that’s the injury you run into here.
• Let the trainer watch the clock. In a gait you lose track of the hour, and a bitgag meanwhile lets the saliva run without your noticing.
• Say beforehand where the scene ends. Schooling can fill a whole evening without any sex involved, and that’s exactly the point where expectations drift apart.

More reading on ponyplay

The three neighboring pages each fill a different gap: animal play for the whole family, petplay for the difference from the kept roles, and horseplay for the list-word that sends you the wrong way in English. The overview of BDSM rooms you can rent names one address with horse stables.

Beyond this site, Anna Maria Gillis’s piece in Humanities on Phyllis and Aristotle reads well next to this subject: a philosopher who lets himself be ridden on hands and knees, in the thirteenth century.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to try this once without buying gear for it right away, the core of it fits inside a single date: a posture, a signal, and someone paying attention. What happens in such an evening and what we put on paper beforehand, you can read at the BDSM date.

Sources

• A Survey of the United Kink-dom: Investigating Five Paraphilic Interest Groups and Their Demographic and Psychological Correlates. Ashley Brown, Edward D. Barker, Stella Friedrich & Qazi Rahman, The Journal of Sex Research 63(3), 412–430, 2026 (DOI 10.1080/00224499.2025.2486472). Authors, volume, issue, and pagination were checked against Crossref. There’s a paywall behind the publisher, so this link points to the freely accessible preprint on PsyArXiv, which is also the text that was read. Provides the sentence in which pony play is counted under pet play, with the two commercial web pages listed beneath it as references and the authors’ own caveat that the research is limited; the verbatim text of the petplay questionnaire item about tail, ears, and a collar; and the role split among 195 participants in which the horse, at 5.1 percent, is the smallest species named, beside dog 31.3, cat 21.5, fox 12.3, and wolf 8.7 percent.
• Delpher newspaper archive. Royal Library. Searched on 10 August 2026 via the SRU service on jsru.kb.nl. Returns zero articles for ponyplay, pony play, and paardenrollenspel; 105 for ponygirl, the oldest of which is in Het vrije volk of 27 February 1989 on page 16 and was read word for word in the OCR; 35 for ponyboy, nearly all about The Outsiders; 17 for ponyspel, all ads for riding camps; and 513 for paardje spelen.
• Animal roleplay. Pony play. Wikipedia. Used here only for what gets practiced: the program of a real schooling, with walking and cantering translated onto human limbs.
• Object Lesson: Did Aristotle Really Humiliate Himself for Phyllis?. Anna Maria Gillis, Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, spring 2017. Provides that the legend was spread in the thirteenth century by the cleric Jacques de Vitry, that Phyllis would give in to his advances only if she could ride on his back, that the philosopher then went on hands and knees, that the scene was depicted on combs, mirrors, and dishes, and that the story is a medieval invention with no link to the historical Aristotle.
• pony. Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Provides powny in the 1650s as “a very small horse”, from Scots, probably by way of the obsolete French poulenet “little foal”, diminutive of poulain, from the Late Latin pullanus, the young of an animal.

Related terms

Ponyplay borders three things at once: the other animal roles, the tack, and everything to do with schooling.

• Animal play. The umbrella ponyplay is a branch of, with the kept animal roles alongside it.
• Petplay. The branch where the animal is kept and pampered, exactly what ponyplay doesn’t do.
• Horseplay. The list-word that points to the same thing in Dutch and means something else in English.
• Bit and bitgag. The object the steering in ponyplay rests on, with what it does and doesn’t block.
• Position training. The same schooling without an animal role: postures taken on a single word.
• Objectification. Where the role goes one step further and there’s nothing left to train.
• Puppy play. The best-researched animal role, where rewarding does what practicing does in ponyplay.