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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40334
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You could look at how children perceive animals that they do not yet know. What they do is subsume animals that look alike into the same category. At first every animal is called a "dog" (if a dog is the first animal a child knows). Then different classes of animals are differentiated, as the parents give names to the different species, and eventually the child will learn to recognize a new animal as different from the ones he or she knows and _not_ give it a name that doesn't apply, even though she doesn't yet know the correct one.

So, if your narrator is mentally immature or doesn't much care about animals she might first think the horse is a big kind of dog and call it "dog". If she is of adult intelligence, she might see the similarity but notice the differences (mane, different tail, different teeth, different feet, etc.) and think of it as "a dog-like animal" or, if she is more scientifically inclined, as "the big quadruped". She might even be able to tell the predator from the herbivore, because a similar difference might exist in her home, and she might think of the new animal along these lines, e.g. as "the big herbivore" or, if she encounters the horse in its capacity as a mount, as "the mount".

Much of what she will call the horse will depend on the circumstances of the encounter (being ridden or on a pasture, from afar or suddenly upon her) as well as her personality and what aspect of it she will focus on most (the smell, the neighing, the size, the shape, the color, etc.). So your answer will very much depend on the story and the characterization you have chosen, and you need to derive at least part of your answer from that.

Original score: 4