A bet settled by a camera
For centuries people argued about whether all four hooves leave the ground at once when a horse runs at a GALLOP. It happens too fast for the eye to see, and painters usually showed horses with their legs stretched out front and back like a rocking horse.
In 1878 the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, working for the American businessman Leland Stanford, lined up a row of cameras along a track, each triggered as the horse passed. The pictures showed that all four hooves are off the ground at one moment — but with the legs tucked underneath the body, not stretched out. Every painting had been wrong. The sequence of photographs is also one of the first steps towards moving pictures.
Measured in hands
Horses are measured in hands, an old unit of four inches, from the ground to the top of the shoulders, called the withers. A horse of 15.2 hands is fifteen hands and two inches. Anything under about 14.2 hands is generally called a PONY, though ponies are also a type, stockier and hardier than horses of the same height.
At the other end are the heavy working breeds, the SHIRE and the CLYDESDALE, bred to pull ploughs and brewers' carts. Shires are among the tallest horses of all, and some stand over eighteen hands. The ARABIAN is one of the oldest breeds and usually has one fewer pair of ribs than other horses.
Sleeping standing up
Horses can doze standing up. Special ligaments in their legs, known as the stay apparatus, lock the joints so the horse can relax without falling over, a useful trick for a prey animal that may need to run at any moment. But they cannot get deep, dreaming sleep that way. For that they must lie down, usually for short spells, and often while another horse in the herd stays standing as a lookout.
The four natural paces run from slowest to fastest: walk, TROT, CANTER and gallop. A horse communicates with its ears, tail and a NEIGH or whinny, and a HOOF is really a single enlarged toe, covered in the same material as a fingernail. Horses can only breathe through their noses, not their mouths, and they have some of the largest eyes of any land mammal, set wide on the head so they can see almost all the way around.
Wild horses that are not quite wild
The MUSTANG herds of the American West are feral rather than truly wild: they descend from horses brought by Spanish settlers from the 1500s onwards, which escaped or were let loose. A BRONCO is an untrained or bucking horse, a word from the Spanish for rough. Our Wild West page covers the cowboys who depended on them.
Coat colours have their own names. A PALOMINO is golden with a pale MANE and tail, a PINTO has large patches of white and another colour, and an APPALOOSA is spotted. A STALLION is an adult male, a GELDING a male that has been neutered, and a MARE a female. The rest of the grid is the tack and the home: the SADDLE, the BRIDLE, the REINS and the STABLE.