Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  It was the same in old Hungary. The horse herdsman had a much higher rank than the shepherd.

  One national American study in 1991 noted that U.S. courts punish cruelty to animals according to the animal’s market value, and in that hierarchy cruelty to horses has long been deemed the greatest sin. Starving a horse generally netted the offender twenty times more days in jail than starving a dog. Respect for the horse is deeply rooted.

  But how much did riders and trainers through time actually know about the horse? The truth, it seems, is that some knew a great deal but most had no clue. Xenophon may have been ahead of his time, but horses, sad to say, have seen few of his ilk during the thousands of years they have spent in human company.

  I once mentioned to another writer that I was working on a book about horses. His advice was to include a chapter for people like him, who hated horses as a child and who still hate them. This man grew up on the prairie in the 30s and 40s and rode to school on horseback. Clearly, by his sour recollection, the rider had never been trained to ride, nor had his horse been properly schooled. Naturally, neither much liked the other. A little knowledge would have gone a long way.

  Artists, meanwhile, clung for centuries to the notion that the horse in a gallop had both forward legs stretched out before him; and the rear, the same. Painters depicted rocking horses, therefore, not real ones. Sculptors of bronze equestrian statues even erred in depicting the horse’s walk. Familiarity had bred not so much contempt as a dogged ignorance. We already knew the horse, didn’t we?

  It appears not. We stand to be surprised. And so it is that The Nature of Horses, written in 1997 by Stephen Budiansky, is full of surprises. “It has only been in the last ten years or so,” he writes, “that basic science has begun to focus intensively on the horse, and the resulting explosion of research into the evolution, behavior, biomechanics, energenetics, perception, learning, and genetics of horses has yielded remarkable insights into the true nature of the beast.”

  When I was in Wyoming riding Radish, we played a kind of game. I would occasionally ask that he lengthen his stride in the walk, as opposed to trotting, which he preferred — a matter of saving my seat and his energy. Radish’s eagerness to trot, I presumed, had something to do with his general excitability and his desire to be at the front of the pack — which may well have been factors.

  But what I learned from Budiansky’s book is that new research has shown how a medium trot is actually more energy efficient than a fast walk. Likewise, a medium canter is more efficient than a fast trot. In a very real way, then, Radish — who faced long days, steep mountain trails and taxing desert crossings — was trying, if only I would let him, to do the smart thing. Conserve energy.

  Smart is a word not commonly associated with horses. Countless books about horses, even the sympathetic ones, make repeated references to “our dumb companions” and “the noble brutes.” In The Nature of Horses, Budiansky claims the middle ground, suggesting that horses are neither as smart as, say, Clever Hans was supposed to be, nor as dimwitted as some detractors still claim.

  There is an arresting image in his book: a photograph of a robot with what look to be eyes and four legs. Powering it is a great tangle of wires, software and hardware. George Lucas might have wanted to mount a laser on it for use in his Star Wars films, though the thing looks more about malarkey than malevolence. The robot is the creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Leg Lab and illustrates how enormously complicated four-legged locomotion is.

  Budiansky argues that we give too little credit to the horse’s intelligence considering the amount of information processing involved when a horse canters on uneven ground with a (not necessarily balanced or gifted) rider in the saddle. Cantering may come naturally to the horse, but it is still impressive when you stop to think about it.

  A staple of television science programs is the video of the octopus removing the lid from a jar to get at the food inside — proof, we conclude, of the animal’s problem-solving ability and therefore of his intelligence. Carnivores (mostly) ourselves, we prize carnivore logic. Octopi and horses, it turns out, do equally well on tests involving a choice between two visual patterns to get at a food reward behind one of them. The horse’s reputation for memory, it seems, is richly deserved. A horse, for example, after learning twenty pairs of signs (the food reward is always behind the cross, never the circle; the L, never the R) remembered them all on retesting, and even twelve months later demonstrated almost perfect retention.

  Memory is critical for a grazing animal whose survival hinges on recalling where that watering hole in the high desert was or where the grass in one sheltered valley stayed green long into winter. Horses are not uniformly adept at problem solving (a simple maze test in which a left turn led to a reward and a right turned to a dead end still confounded 20 percent of horses after five trials), but they don’t have to be. Carnivores must find and catch their prey, which will try to elude them in myriad ways; herbivores must simply locate food. Different problem, different mind-set. As Budiansky says, “Mice move and hide, grass doesn’t.”

  Unlike the carnivore, the horse’s primary tasks are to reproduce and, when danger presents, to flee. But even fleeing, as the MIT Leg Lab knows all too well, is tricky business.

  When Columbus brought horses to the New World in 1494 on his second voyage, the twenty-four stallions and ten mares on board his fleet were actually returning to the land of their ancestors. The horse first evolved in North America: the forerunner was a little doglike creature that anthropologists now call Hyracotherium, or Eohippus, though I like what they used to call it in the dinosaur books I devoured as a child — the “dawn horse.” Over time, as the climate changed and got drier, the forests gave way to grassland in the center of the continent. And although Incitatus and Morzillo got chicken, grass, of course, is what horses love to graze on.

  As the savannah grew more lush, the little dawn horse got bigger. The prehistoric horse could no longer hide as he had from his enemies in the forest; he became a creature of flight, and his legs grew longer. His several toes evolved into one toe — a hoof. Over time the dawn horse’s teeth changed to handle new vegetation: not leaves and fruit but grass, and lots of it. He would need powerful front teeth to clip the grass, and molars to chew it. To make room for these teeth, the horse’s face grew longer, and eyes set on the side of his head gave him 360-degree vision to spot his enemies.

  The result was Equus caballus, the horse we know today. Equus thrived on the Great Plains, then a seemingly endless pasture. Using land bridges that no longer exist, some horses crossed over to what is now Europe and Asia. But about fifteen thousand years ago all the horses in North America — along with camels, saber-toothed cats, mastodons and some other creatures — disappeared. No one is sure why. Was it climate change or massive flooding? Did primitive humans hunt horses to extinction? Or did disease do them in? For eons, our continent was horseless.

  3.2 Cave painting in France: the horse was a source of both food and inspiration to our ancestors. (photo credit 3.2)

  (Or was it? A controversial “lingering herds theory,” proposed by some anthropologists, argues that pockets of horses survived the Pleistocene. These academics point to the fact that the Dakota-Lakota people between the Mississippi and the Rockies were, even in the early 1700s, “extremely bold and daring riders,” according to French explorers’ accounts. It seems hardly possible, given the limited numbers of Spanish horses then on the continent. But until the bones of post-Pleistocene/pre-Columbian horses can be found and dated, the lingering herds theory will remain just that.)

  Meanwhile, on the plains of Russia, primitive horses continued to survive and spread into present day Europe. But here, too, they were a source of food long before they were ever domesticated or ridden. Near the French village of Solutré, scientists have found a three-foot-deep layer of horse bones stretching over several acres. The remains of some one hundred thousand horses lie here. Their skins and dung
and flesh would have offered warmth and firelight and food.

  Equus might have disappeared in Asia and Europe, as in North America, had someone with a bold imagination not demonstrated other uses for the horse. Perhaps early humans gave the horse a role to play in a rite of passage or some spiritual quest. Domestication of the horse would then have led to practical uses in transportation and war. Humans have caused the demise of many species, but by our bits and bridles and harnesses we may have actually saved one from extinction.

  The long evolutionary road from Hyracotherium to Equus, or even Columbus’s oceanic path from Spain to Hispaniola (Haiti), was, however, no simple trajectory. If it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, it is also true that nothing is as it seems.

  Let’s start with Columbus. Growing up in the 1950s, I was taught in geography class that flat-earth fearmongers wearing the scarlet robes of a cardinal tried to dissuade Spanish royalty from backing Columbus on his journey. They worried, as sailors did, about going over the edge.

  In an essay entitled “The Late Birth of a Flat Earth” (collected in Dinosaur in a Haystack), the evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tries to fathom why he was taught in the 1950s this same myth: that for a thousand years in the so-called Dark or Middle Ages, scholars believed the earth was flat.

  The tale painted Columbus as brave seeker; the clerics, as narrow buffoons warming up for the Inquisition. Science versus Religion. Light versus Dark.

  That pungent parable lodged in my brain. But little of the story is true. Aristotle and the Greeks — several hundred years before the birth of Christ — knew the earth was round, as did both scholars and clerics long before and during Columbus’s time. When Columbus approached Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, looking for patronage, the clerics did indeed question him. They grilled him on his figures, convinced he had underestimated the circumference of the earth, and they were absolutely right.

  The flat-earth myth, Gould argues, took hold in the late 1800s in Britain when certain intellectuals needed “whipping boys and legends” to advance their theory of history as the victory march of enlightened science over grim religion. The story fell into the history books like an errant mosquito trapped between pages when a heavy book is snapped shut.

  As for the breeding stock Columbus brought to the New World, the horses were less fine than imagined. It seems that before boarding ship the officers sold the purebred steeds they were supposed to bring in order to buy wine for the journey. What little money remained was used to buy some cheap and sorry horses. Only six survived the awful crossing. Crammed into small ships, the horses were hoisted with straps under their bellies and suspended from the ceiling of the lower decks for some forty days and forty nights. Typically, a third of them perished on these journeys.

  (Later, as other ships — with horses on board — sailed to the New World, their sails sometimes went slack in the often wind-free zones at Cancer thirty degrees north latitude and Capricorn thirty degrees south latitude. When water supplies ran out and the horses went mad with thirst, sailors shot them and tossed their bodies overboard to the sharks. The regions are still called the horse latitudes.)

  Even after death, the Italian boy who had married a Portuguese and sailed for Spain went on journeying: Columbus’s bones were disinterred many times over the centuries and lie now, it is claimed, in the great cathedral of Seville. I have stood before the high, elaborate tomb and can report that he lies flat, as flat as the earth was once purported to be.

  As for the neat evolutionary line from Eohippus to Equus, here, too, Gould reminds us that Darwinian evolution is not just a slow, steady going to the light, with each species improving and adapting through time. Gould and many of his colleagues believe that if the evolution of horses, humans or dinosaurs is seen as a tree or bush, “Trends surely exist in abundance, and they do form the stuff of conventional good stories. Brain size does increase in the human bush; and toes do get fewer, and bodies bigger, as we move up the bush of horses. But the vast majority of bushes display no persistent trends through time.”

  Gould argues for something he calls “stasis”: the notion that evolutionary change occurs comparatively quickly and in small, isolated populations, but that for glacially long periods, no change at all is the norm. The history of Equus would seem to back his contention: until twenty million years ago, when the horse branched out into variously sized versions, the body size of ancestral horses had remained a virtual constant for thirty million years.

  It would also be wrong to view certain branches of the equine tree as evolutionary failures, or to see Equus as evolutionary perfection. At one point in the vast history of the horse, thirteen species existed simultaneously, some big, some small and all, in their own way, successful. We do like a good story — witness the revisionism around Columbus — preferably a tidy, romantic one. The evolutionary truth is infinitely more complex, and more interesting, than that.

  In the meantime, we should respect both horses and dinosaurs, who have proven their mettle in that harshest of tests, the test of time. When a Yukon government archeologist named Ruth Gotthardt was asked in 1993 to investigate the carcass of a horse found frozen in the ice — it turned out to be a twenty-six-thousand-year-old horse, and remarkably like contemporary horses — she initially had grave doubts about the specimen’s age. What greeted her nose when she descended into the trench that day was “the unmistakable smell of horse droppings.” Gotthardt was astonished that “something from the Ice Age could keep that smell of horse.” Call it an enduring smell, and a tidy metaphor for longevity.

  In considering the long and stalwart history of horses, and the fact that there are now some sixty million horses on the planet, we must also give a nod to lady luck.

  Budiansky, in The Nature of Horses, comes to grips with a most intriguing question. Why is it that humans managed to domesticate horses (along with cows, sheep, dogs, cats, pigs and goats) and not other creatures? The ancient Egyptians attempted the same thing with antelope, gazelles, hyenas and ibex. No luck. American Indians apparently kept pet raccoons, bears, even moose, while aborigines in Australia did the same with wallabies and kangaroos. No luck there, either.

  As chance or fate would have it, the horse actually seemed designed to accommodate some sort of partnership. Small wonder the ancients saw the horse as a gift of the gods. Capable of surviving on meager fodder that would soon starve a cow, the horse also possessed a gap — called a “diastema” — between the front teeth and the back molars: a perfect place for the bit, in turn attached to bridle and reins. The horse, also happily for humankind, was a social creature whose complex and silent language, with all its signals for aggression and submission, enabled the animal to understand similar human signals. In other words, you could train Equus. You cannot always do that with other animals, even equine cousins. Trainers trying to work with young zebras in harness typically report calamitous results.

  Stories of intractability abound about Przewalski’s horse, a wild cousin to the horse and once native to China, Russia and Mongolia. This breed is now presumed extinct in the wild after the last one was spotted a few decades ago. The horse owes his name to a Polish-born officer of the Imperial Russian Army, Colonel Nikolai Przewalski, who shot one on the China-Mongolia border more than a hundred years ago and shipped the skull back to a zoological museum in St. Petersburg. Some twelve hundred individuals — descendants of eleven caught at the turn of the century — still exist in zoos and captive breeding centers around the world. Today, about forty “P-horses,” as they are sometimes called, roam a one hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre reserve in Mongolia, where Przewalski’s horse remains the national symbol.

  3.3 Przewalski’s horse: a member of the equine line that dates back 55 million years. (photo credit 3.3)

  Only twelve to fourteen hands high, with a dorsal stripe and spiky black mane, these horses have a reputation for intensity, aggression and wariness; they look strikingly similar to the horses drawn
by our Stone Age ancestors on cave walls fifteen thousand years ago.

  In free-range pastures, Przewalski’s horses will form a circle — as musk ox and zebras and wild ponies do — against wild dogs or other predators, and both mares and stallions will menace human or animal interlopers. In one account, a small Przewalski’s stallion rather savagely dispatched a bigger domestic stallion who sadly underestimated his opponent. With one exception (a horse at the San Diego Zoo), none of these primitive horses, as far as I know, has ever been tamed or ridden. Their reputation for aggression, though, may be inflated: the zoologist Lee Boyd, who has studied them in Mongolia, told me they are no more aggressive than the mustangs of the American plains.

  Finally, and this may be the most significant element of all in why the horse-human bond developed, recent evidence from archeology and animal behavior studies suggest that the partnership was as much the horse’s idea as the human’s. Like mice and rats, raccoons and cockroaches, horses may have learned that while hanging around human settlements came at a cost to a few unlucky individuals (who became horse stew), the overall advantages for the herd far outweighed the disadvantages. Predators were less inclined to prey on them so close to villages, and the crops the horses raided offered better-than-usual fare.

  Domestication was a natural consequence, but only for those horses, as Budiansky puts it, who were “more curious, less territorial, less aggressive, more dependent, [and] better able to deflect human aggression through submission.”

  The best archeological evidence — from the wearing on horse teeth due to crib biting — suggests that the habit of corralling or tethering horses may go back thirty thousand years. Evidence for the first rider, again from the latest dental remains, locates that moment on the Russian steppes some six thousand years ago. But Harold B. Barclay, the anthropologist, holds out an intriguing possibility: perhaps early riders had no need of bits but rode skin to skin as the Plains Indians more or less did.