Carol A. Butler - Knowing Horses: Q&As to Boost Your Equine IQ

KNOWING HORSES

Q&As to Boost Your Equine IQ

LES SELLNOW & CAROL A. BUTLER
Illustrations by Elara Tanguy

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment.

Edited by Lisa H. Hiley
Art direction and book design by Cynthia N. McFarland
Cover design by Alethea Morrison
Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith

Illustrations by Elara Tanguy
Cover photograph by Mark J. Barrett
Wyoming license plate reproduced with permission from the State of Wyoming

Indexed by Nancy D. Wood

2012 by Carol A. Butler and Les Sellnow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other without written permission from the publisher.

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Storey Publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Sellnow, Les.
Knowing horses / by Les Sellnow and Carol A. Butler.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60342-798-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Horses. 2. HorsesBehavior. 3. HorsesTraining.
4. HorsesHistory. I. Butler, Carol A., 1943 II. Title.
SF285.S436 2012
636.1dc23
2012013933

This book is dedicated to the concerned horse owners and trainers who through the years have stopped breaking horses and substituted gentle persuasion in a kind and compassionate manner.

Thanks to Frank Vigilante for suggesting to Carol that she write a book about horses and for helping her to find Les as a co-author. We enjoyed working together to create this book, and we thank our agent, Deirdre Mullane, and our editor, Lisa Hiley, for helping us get to the finish line.

A Few Equine Essentials

O ver many thousands of years, horses have provided humankind with food, transportation, mobility, speed, and strength. They shaped our history by allowing people to spread around the globe, helping us become farmers and herders, and bringing us into the Industrial Age. But beyond the purely practical, the human imagination has always been captured by the grace, beauty, and spirit of the horse. Something elemental and deeply emotional draws us to them, inspiring artists, poets, and anyone who is intrigued by the otherness of animals.

A A horse is an ungulate, herbivorous quadruped, which basically means it has hooves, eats grass, and has four legs. The present-day Equus ferus caballus is the only remaining subspecies of the formerly large and complex family called Equidae. Over the past 60 million years, the horse has evolved from a fox-sized, multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal found throughout the world in different colors and sizes. (See When did horses first appear on earth?, .)

A The approximately 300 breeds of horses and ponies worldwide all belong to the same species, Equus caballus. Donkeys and asses are a different species, E. asinus. Mules are a hybrid of these two, not a separate species. The only true wild horse, the Przewalski Horse, is in a class by itself: E. ferus Przewalski. (See The Last Truly Wild Horse, .) Then there are zebras (see the facing page).

FAST FACT The quagga, a subspecies of the plains zebra once found in southern Africa, was hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century.

From tiny Eohippus to modern Equus, the horse has come a long way. Horses are in the family Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates, which makes them related to rhinoceroses and tapirs.