As the saying goes: You can’t teach an old Dogg new tricks.
West Coast music legend Snoop Dogg has mastered his craft as a rapper and frequent actor, but he refuses to work with a particular kind of animal. The “Doggystyle” emcee came clean on Wednesday’s episode of his GGN podcast — telling guest Tiffany Haddish he’s “scared of horses.”
“I’m scared of horses to this day, Tiff,” he told Haddish, who’d just described her own girlhood dreams of one day raising the animals. “I don’t know why, I’m just fucking scared of them. I’m so serious. You ain’t never seen me in a scene with a horse.”
“I’ve been in a scene with ostriches, iguanas, all kinds of shit ... Ain’t never been in a scene with a horse,” he went on. “Like, get that motherfucker away from me.”
Surprisingly, Snoop said that his wife, Shante Broadus, once owned a horse for three years and regularly rode it for “her peace of mind.” Snoop told Haddish that he refused to interact with the animal due to his equinophobia.
“Maybe in your past life you fell off a horse,” Haddish suggested.
The rapper quipped he was probably the Headless Horseman instead, referring to a folkloric figure popularized by Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Snoop, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, doesn’t seem to mind most other animals ― even the ones that are generally unwelcome.
“In my apartment I had a roach that we couldn’t kill,” he told the famed entertainment journalist Nardwuar in July. “We tried to kill the motherfucker when we first moved in and he wouldn’t die, so we called him ‘The Gooch.’ And he just kept getting bigger and bigger ... We used to leave food out for him.”
Snoop isn’t the only famous rapper with an admitted fear of horses ― or even the only one associated with hip-hop kingmaker Dr. Dre. Best-selling rapper Eminem wrote in his 2008 book “The Way I Am” that he fought to delete an equine-related scene from the movie “8 Mile,” in which he starred in 2002.
“The horse was doing this crazy head-jerking movement, and I thought, any minute this motherfucker’s going to lift his head up and bust my fucking jaw and knock me the fuck out,” Eminem wrote, per Entertainment Weekly. “Horses and me, we don’t get on too well.”
“I wouldn’t fuck with a horse,” the Detroit rapper continued. “If a horse dissed me, I wouldn’t say anything back.”
For his part, Snoop told Haddish that he’s open to confronting his fears, and that he understands “what a horse [means] to people.”
The 16-time Grammy nominee even suggested that “maybe one day, somebody can introduce me to a baby horse” so he can start slow ― “a little jackass or something that I can learn how to be around.”