Straight from the horse's mouth

Equus caballus has served us for millennia on the land, the battlefield and in the sporting arena, so it’s no wonder our passion for our trusty steeds remains unbridled, says John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

LONG ago, when northern Europe was refrigerated in the Ice Age, a primitive human took a piece of mammoth ivory and commenced carving. The so-called ‘Vogelherd horse’, named for the German cave in which it was discovered, is an exquisite artifact. The 2in figurine captures perfectly, in the arch of the neck, the muscular power of the stallion; the slightly cocked head gives the animal the requisite air of contemplation. Our fascination—and our connection—with horses are old and unbridled; the Vogelherd horse has sculpted 40,000 years ago when we hunted equines for the camp barbecue. Since those misty Paleolithic days, we have ridden horses (archaeologists suggest Equus was domesticated in Kazakhstan, 5,500 years ago), milked them, loaded them as pack animals, used them for haulage, as war machines, for sport, and for companionship.

Oddly, Man’s second-best friend has rarely been considered worthy of ethological investigation, unlike, say, chimps and dolphins. In the past decade, science has begun to make good the omission—with results surprising even to those of us who never think of a horse as ‘it’, only ‘he’ or ‘she’, cannot understand why ‘horse’ is not bottled as the finest eau de cologne, believe we will meet our past horses in Heaven (if there are no horses, it’s not Heaven, QED) and have experienced steeds as diverse as laid-back Neddy at riding school and prima donna Kleo coming home late along the lane from a hack. A literal nightmare.