The Horse

I‘ve been editing the next Will Diaz adventure, Event Horizon. In it, Will and his buddy Jonesy become involved in an old west fashioned man hunt high up in the mountains. Their means of transport is one people have used for thousands of years, and that’s the horse. It got me thinking about the remarkable animal, so here we go.

Once upon a time, if a man or woman wanted to go someplace, they walked.

The human race wasn’t much back then. We lived off the land and that makes for hungry people. Going after anything much bigger than a jack rabbit was an iffy proposition. We had our fire, we had our tents, we had our stone spears and arrows, and humans still walked everywhere they went.

And then someplace along the line, we got a great partner called the horse. No one knows exactly how or where the animal was domesticated, but one thing is for sure, we wouldn’t have the world we have today without the horse.

for my money, the laziest person in the world (or history for that matter) is responsible for domesticating the horse. I don’t know if they just plain got tired of walking or if they got tired of carrying the load on their own. But someplace along the way he or she got hold of the horse. The how of it is lost in the mysteries of time

The first evidence we have of human domesticating horses comes out of what is now present-day Kazakhstan, and this was almost 4000 years before Christ rode a colt into Jerusalem. It seems the horse wasn’t being ridden much yet but was being used for its meat and milk.

There is evidence that they were being ridden, however. As such they must have made great hunting partners. Mix a horse and a human with weapons like the spear and\or a bow and arrow and we’re talking food on the table.

The evidence found is the animal bones with humans, and these horses are a little different from the wild pony’s of the day. The evidence seems to suggest we were already trying to build a better animal using selective breeding.

It wasn’t until almost two thousand years later we start seeing horses as draft animals. While it’s a given they were used to pull wagons with loads, their biggest utility was for war. In ancient Mesopotamia, we find the first stone drawings of horses pulling war chariots.

It’s a cinch that the horse was being used to till ground and help clear land years before that.

Somewhere around 400-500 BC, the saddle was invented, and the stirrup (thought there some debate about this) almost 800 year later.

There were places on Earth where the horse was unknown. The Native Americans were astonished by it. But when they learned how fast it was, and how it could work alongside people, and become a friend, they knew it had to be some kind of sacred animal.

There’s very few cities or nation around that hasn’t been built by the horse. It carried the bricks that made the cities, and it pulled the carts that carried people to other lands. It turned the soil and fed millions of souls.

Today, the work the horse did has largely been turned over to machines. Farmers use massive machines to turn the ground. Cities have trucks to deliver loads of lumber or steel. And the common person gets from point A to B at nearly the speed of sound.

Even ranchers, in some cases no longer use it, replacing it instead with ATVs and motorbikes.

But in places, the animal is still a valuable ally in survival. It’s cared for, fed, carries the load, and is valuable partner. Children still ride it, and it still forms a partnership with men and women.

We’d have been poorer as a species had we never befriended the horse.