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The way a horse is
referred to can tell you a lot about its color. If it is called a bay
horse, it would be brown and have a black mane and tail; a chestnut, on
the other hand, would be a reddish brown horse with the mane and tail in
almost the same color or a slightly different shade. A palomino would be
golden in color, with a creamy white mane and tail. Eyes like those of a
horse would have come in handy. Large eyes protruding from the sides of
the head enable it to see behind without even turning its head. Their
ability to see at night is excellent but they are prone to color
blindness. Straight
from the horse’s mouth
Horses are members of the Equidae family and like the other members of this family they have
nature’s gift for being able to travel long distances efficiently and
surviving on a diet of high fiber grasses that have a low nutrition
content. Nature has provided them with strong dentures to tackle their
fibrous diet. Powerful jaws house strong teeth which grow even as it wears
down with use. In fact, an essential part of caring for a horse is to file
rough edges of the teeth and align biting surfaces.
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The horse forms strong
associations with others of its herds and can even understand subtle cues.
This ability has enabled man to be able to train horses. Any communication
made to the horse is understood and acted upon.
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Run
through history
Horses have always been
important domestic animals, and the first horses to be domesticated were
in Eurasia about 6,000 years ago. The ancestors of the horse as we know it
today evolved millions of years ago in North America. Being great ones for
travel, they traveled to other parts of the world. Horses vanished in the
Americas about 15,000 years ago, during one of the mass extinctions that
occurred at the time. They came back to the Americas in the 1490s with
Christopher Columbus. One of the wild horses that has survived till date
is the Przewalski’s horse which can be seen in zoos and other natural
sanctuaries.
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How
many hands?
A horse is usually measured
from a particular point between its neck and back. The measurement is
usually made in ‘hands’. One hand is the equivalent of 10 centimeters
or four inches. The smallest horse measured has been 48 centimeters or
just about five hands high. The largest horse has measured up to 18 hands
or six feet high.
Fleet
footed (Typical
characteristics of horses)
The best features of a horse
are its special legs. The legs are not what they look like at first
glance. Going by our own leg structure we mistakenly assume the first
joint above the foot to be the knee. This however is not so. That joint is
the horse’s ankle. So what we think of as the lower portion of the leg
is actually an elongated foot.
The tough curved hoofs
protect the horse’s toes. The sole of the horse’s foot has a rubbery
structure shaped like a ‘V’, which helps absorb the force of the
impact when the foot comes into contact with the ground. The horse’s
legs may be very long but they are very light, as they are made up of a
minimum of bone and tendon and have practically no muscle. The types of
joints present in a horse’s leg require very little muscle for movement.
So the long and light legs aid fast movement with the energy expended for
the purpose being kept to a minimum. |
