The moose way you speak of:

package Animal;
use Moose;
has [qw/name age/] => ( isa => 'Str', is => 'rw' );

package Horse;
use Moose;
extends 'Animal';

sub present {
  my $self = shift;
  print $self->isa('Animal') ? "I am an animal" : "I am not animal"
}
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With that said, I think there is something seriously wrong if you want your subclass to confirm that it inherits from the parent class in a method ;)