Animal of the week February 27, 2013 -- chomping on the wonder horse

AOTW hardly has its talon on the pulse of current affairs, but I was slow to react to the major UK news event of 2013 because I was convinced that Equus ferus caballus (horse) had already been animal of the week. But having gone back through the entire archive (how I suffer), I can confirm that it hasn’t. So, perhaps, given that so many of us are likely now intimately acquainted with horse through digestion, we should find out a little more about it.

Although there is a superficial similarity between horses, antelopes, and indeed cattle, the closest living relatives of horses are rhinoceroses and tapirs, which together form a group called the odd-toed ungulates (hoofed animals with an odd number of toes). This group is distantly related to the even-toed ungulates—the group that includes pigs, camels, cows, deer, and even hippos and whales. So whales and cows are more closely related to each other than either is to a horse.

Mustangs (feral horses) in Utah, Jamie Jackon wikicommons

Until around 10 000 years ago, wild horses lived across the Eurasia and North America, but at the end of the ice age, the numbers decreased rapidly, and horses vanished from North America and dwindled across the rest of their range. Only the Przewalski's horse (E ferus przewalski) and tarpan (E ferus ferus) survived into modern times: a few Prezewalski's survived in zoos and have now been reintroduced onto the Mongolian steppes, and the last tarpan died in the early 1900s. But their usefulness to humans gave domestic horses a new lease of life: they are now found throughout the world and feral populations have recolonised North America and established themselves in areas where previously horses were never found -- such as in Australia.

Genetic evidence suggests horses were domesticated around 6000 years ago, with most archaeological evidence pointing to a similar date, somewhere around the steps of the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and southwest Russia, although recent archaeological finds suggest that horses might have been domesticated in Arabia some 9000 years ago. The genes of domestic horses tell us that they are descended from a few original stallions, but the domestic stocks were often supplemented with wild caught mares over the centuries. Whenever domestication happened, the relationship between humans and horses is an ancient one. And as a source of meat, milk, hair, hides, transport, and labour horses have played an integral part in the development of human culture, perhaps moreso than any other animal.

Now, I've never intentionally eaten horse, but I'm not too bothered with the idea: if the animal has been well looked after or lived a fairly natural life, if I know what I'm eating, and the species is not endangered and I don't think the animal has suffered unduly in the process of it reaching my plate, I'll pretty much eat anything. The recent horsemeat in beef scandal that has erupted in Europe, however, is an indictment of our food production chains and a symptom of the dire economic straits in which many people find themselves, so that they can be exploited by unscrupulous food manufacturers and supermarkets. But this sort of talk is galloping beyond the remit of AOTW.

Anyway, horses, aren't they great? Let me sum up my feelings with the annotated jingle from a much loved advert. I love horses, best of all the animals (along with all the rest; AOTW has no favourites); I love horses, they're my friends (they're not really, I find horses a bit weird, as though they think they are people trapped in an animal's body, unable to comprehend why they don't have opposable thumbs and can't ride humans or smoke a fag, I guess that's what comes of living so closely with people for so long)!