Langrish Bob - Horses

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Copyright 2014 in text: Nicola Jane Swinney
Copyright 2014 in photographs: Bob Langrish
Copyright 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Note on measurements

Imperial measurements are traditionally used in the equestrian world, with races, for example, always being expressed in miles, yards and furlongs. Horses are traditionally measured as hands high (hh) at the shoulder, with a hand being 4 inches.

In his iconic poem In Praise of the Horse, Ronald Duncan says about the horse that All our history is his industry. The phrase perfectly sums up our eternal relationship with equines; throughout human history, worldwide, the horse has been there with us at work, at war and at leisure. While the dog is universally known as mans best friend, perhaps the horse better deserves this epithet. This book profiles more than 70 of the worlds horse breeds, describing their history, development, characteristics and relationship with humans.

It is now widely accepted that the first ancestor of todays horse, Equus, was Hyracotherium, also known as Eohippus, or Dawn Horse. Dating back to the Eocene epoch 5634 million years ago, this creature bore little resemblance to the modern equine. Living in the forests of North America, it was somewhat doglike, with a short neck, arched back, short legs and long tail. It had four toes on each front foot and three behind, and walked on pads like a dog.

Hyracotherium was a grazer living on fruits and soft foliage, and was a successful forest dweller, changing little for around 20 million years. Then the climate of North America changed, becoming drier. The vast tracts of forest shrank and grasses evolved. Hyracotherium grew taller and leggier so that it could run faster in the open, where it was at its most vulnerable, and its teeth became tougher to enable it to grind down grasses. At this stage it became known as Mesohippus.

It should be noted that the evolution from Hyracothium to the modern Equus is not a progression along a neat straight line, even though it is often depicted as such. Rather, Equus is but a branch of the evolutionary tree. For example, after Mesohippus came Miohippus, a change that occurred quite suddenly in evolutionary terms. Miohippus was larger than its older cousin, with a longer skull, its ankle joints altered and its teeth changed. Fossil evidence shows that these two animals overlapped, rather than Mesohippus gradually morphing into Miohippus.

Later transformations saw the horse begin to walk on tiptoe, using its middle toe rather than its pads to enable it to run fast; its leg bones fused and its musculature strengthened to make it a swift runner. Around 17 million years ago came Merychippus the horse with a new look. Standing at around 10hh (or 40 inches high) and as such being the tallest equid yet, Merychippus was the first animal to closely resemble the modern Equus.

Merychippus underwent rapid transformation and is thought to have developed up to 19 different strains, separated into three groups: three-toed grazers known as hipparions, a line of small horses known as protohippines and a line of true equines. This last was a large horse-type species with small side toes, and it gave rise to at least two separate groups. Both groups lost their side toes and developed side ligaments around the fetlock that helped to stabilize the central toe, enabling them to move at speed.

The one-toed horses included Pliohippus, which until recently was thought to be a direct ancestor of Equus. However, differences in its skull formation and its teeth prove otherwise, although they were obviously related. The second group is Astrohippus, which is considered to be a descendant of Pliohippus. There is a third, recently discovered strain called Dinohippus, around 12 million years old, which bore a compelling resemblance to Equus, although its exact ancestor is unknown. Dinohippus was the most common strain in North America.

Ten million years ago there was an explosion of diversity within the horse family, both in types and in numbers, which has never since been equalled. Our horse, of the genus Equus, developed around four million years ago, and the three-toed hipparion died out altogether. Until about a million years ago, there were Equus horses in vast migrating herds all over Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, but as the Ice Age began the horses of the Americas died out, although the cause of this extinction is unknown.