Book II of my fiction trilogy about horses and history is being published soon. So why did I write about horses?<\/p>\n
The main reason is they teach us about the world, and they’re lots of fun. Here are some reasons I think horses are an interesting subject:<\/p>\n
Horses have always been with us<\/strong><\/p>\n Since Stone Age man first put paint to rock, horses have fascinated and assisted mankind in some capacity: for food, weight-bearing, load-pulling, travel, status, inspiration, therapy, sports, recreation, gambling, war \u2026 it\u2019s amazing how many roles the horse has taken.<\/p>\n The horse and our partnership is filled with paradoxes<\/strong><\/p>\n So much of life isn’t what it seems and horses are no exception. For example:<\/p>\n – A timid prey animal, the horse was history\u2019s most feared engine of war.<\/p>\n – A humble servant, the horse ennobles mankind.<\/p>\n – A century after engines made the horse \u201cobsolete,\u201d there are more horses than ever before.<\/p>\n – Horses can gallop miles with a human on its back and pull tons of weight, but can perish of a missed feeding.<\/p>\n (And they let people ride them!)<\/p>\n Horses haven\u2019t much changed since the Olden Days<\/strong><\/p>\n Horses have been tamed, but they retain their basic character and instincts. Prehistoric man could have raised a prehistoric colt, put a saddle on him and trained him to gallop and jump. What is the difference between then and now?<\/p>\n It took thousands of years to learn to ride horses (and we seem to have forgotten several times). I wonder why it took so long to figure out … unless we <\/em>had to change…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Book II of my fiction trilogy about horses and history is being published soon. So why did I write about horses? The main reason is they teach us about the world, and they’re lots of fun. Here are some reasons I think horses are an interesting subject: Horses have always been with us Since Stone … Continue reading “The Wonderful Strangeness of Horses”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21,158,154],"tags":[108,383],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}