Victorians, progress narrative of
Vienna: equine ethology conference in; Genghis Khan in; Spanish Riding School in; stable art in
Virginia
vision; acuity of; as binocular; in color; depth perception in; experiments on; field of; filtering of; of humans; light levels and; as partnership; range of; running and; of 2-D images
Vogelherd horse
volcanoes
von Petzinger, Genevieve
Voorhies, Jane
Voorhies, Mike
wagons
walking: by hominids; by horses
Walls, G. L.
Wally’s Beach
warm-season grasses
water: access to; human mastery of; memory of; solace in
Wathan, Jennifer
weather, preferences for; see also climate change
Weatherford, Jack
whales
Whishaw, Ian
Whisper (horse)
white coloring
Wild Horse Annie
wild horses; abandonment of; breeding of; as continuum; corralling of; dating of; diets of; domestic horses vs.; ethology and; evolution of; Galician; harvesting from; humans mesmerized by; lore about; Mongolian, see Takhi horses; Pleistocene; prevalence of; protection of; rehabilitation of; riding of; see also rewilding
Wild Horses of the Great Basin (Berger)
wildlife, observation of, see ethology
windstorms
Wise, Sandra
Wit, Piet
withers, riding on
wolves; trapping of
World Heritage sites
World War II; legacy of; Lipizzans and; loaded language from; Takhi and
writing, precursors to
Wyoming; see also American West
Yakut horses
Yana River
Younger Dryas
Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre
Yukon horse; body of; diet of; senses of; size of
Zazula, Grant
zebras
Zimbabwe
zoos; transition out of
An evolutionary tree of the horse’s genetic family, Equidae, showing changes in geographic distribution, diet, and body sizes over the past 56 million years (From Bruce J. MacFadden. “Fossil Horses—Evidence for Evolution.” Science 307 (2005): 1728–30. Reprinted with permission from AAAS)
Three mustang stallions at McCulloch Peaks, not far from Cody, Wyoming (Greg Auger)
Watching Pryor Mountain mustangs with the ethologist Jason Ransom (Greg Auger)
Horses can thrive in both the wettest of climates, like the hyper-Atlantic coast of Galicia, Spain, and extremely dry regions, like the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area in Wyoming, U.S.A. (Greg Auger)
A 47-million-year-old dawn horse preserved at Messel (© Senckenberg, photograph by E. Haupt)
Stylized horses painted more than twelve thousand years ago on the walls of the Ekain cave, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in the Basque region of Spain (Jesús Altuna)
Herwig Radnetter and his Lipizzan stallions (Greg Auger)
The intelligence and sensitivity of horses has been an ongoing artistic theme for at least 35,000 years, seen here in Sawrey Gilpin’s Gulliver Addressing the Houyhnhnms, 1769. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Diego Velázquez’s Philip III on Horseback, 1634–1635 (Prado Museum), and a several-thousand-year-old petroglyph of a horse and rider from the Campo Lameiro in Galicia (Greg Auger). Both Philip III and the ancient rider are depicted holding what the equine ethologist Laura Lagos calls the “stick of power.” This kind of imagery—of horse, rider, and weaponry—has served as a symbol of power for thousands of years.
The colors seen by horses are much more limited than those seen by humans.
The difference between the color vision of a horse and typical human color vision (From Joseph Carroll. “Photopigment Basis for Dichromatic Color Vision in the Horse.” Journal of Vision 1 (2001): 80–87)
Lukas, owned by the Californian Karen Murdock, poses with his Guinness World Records certificate, awarded to him for “the most numbers identified by a horse in one minute.” (Courtesy of Karen Murdock)
Horses have a horizontal visual streak that allows them to see almost directly behind them. Blinders help keep horses in harness from becoming frightened by the vehicles they’re pulling. (davidelliotphotos / Shutterstock)
Kris Kokal and his family rehabilitate mustangs at their farm in New Hampshire. Here, Kris and Belle, one of his rescued horses, enjoy a snowfall. (Greg Auger)
A Mongolian herder with his horse (Greg Auger)
Inge Bouman speaks about rewilding the Takhi at the press conference in Ulaanbaatar celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the return of the horse to Mongolia. (Greg Auger)
Young Mongolian jockeys await the start of a traditional horse race. (Greg Auger)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Williams is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. She is the author of several books, including Kraken and Cape Wind, and is an avid, lifelong equestrienne. She lives in Mashpee, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY WENDY WILLIAMS
Kraken
Cape Wind (with Robert Whitcomb)
Best Bike Paths of New England
Best Bike Paths of the Southwest
The Power Within
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Prologue: Backyard Horse
1. Watching Wild Horses
2. In the Land of Butch Cassidy
3. The Garden of Eden Appears, Then Vanishes
4. The Triumph of Hipparion
5. Equus
Intermezzo
6. The Arch of the Neck
7. The Partnership
8. The Eye of the Horse
9. The Dance of Communication
10. The Rewilding
Epilogue: Backyard Mustang
Author’s Note
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Photographs
A Note About the Author
Also by Wendy Williams
Copyright
Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Wendy Williams
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
An excerpt from The Horse originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Scientific American.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Wendy, 1950–
The horse: the epic history of our noble companion / Wendy Williams. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-374-22440-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-70977-8 (e-book)
1. Horses—History. 2. Horses—Evolution. I. Title.
SF283 .W55 2015
636.1—dc23
2015003860
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FRONTISPIECE: Tecumseh facing off his rivals, photograph by Greg Auger
* “Mustang” in this book does not denote a breed, but a horse of the American West born free on the open range, as opposed to a domestic horse, which I define as a horse born in captivity.
* “Domestic” and “wild” are not, in this book, used as scientific terms, for reasons we’ll consider in much greater depth in future chapters.
* Stallions do sometimes kill foals from other sires, but no one knows how often this happens or why it occurs.
* Some sources suggest that the horses from the collective farms may have joined a population of free-roaming horses present in the region for several hundred years.
* It’s important to differentiate between a “true primate” and earlier primate-like creatures, which are found in more ancient rock layers and are often written about in the popular press as “primates.”
* The genus Equus, that is.
* Sadly, Agenbroad died shortly after our conversation, at the age of eighty-one.
* At least, they haven’t yet.
* Although they are being reintroduced in a few remote places.
* In a limited fashion.
* When horses do not wear down their teeth by constantly grazing, they cannot close their mouths properly. Technicians take care of this problem by filing—floating—the teeth for the horses.
* More than 90 percent of these loans are successfully repaid.