Timothy Winegard did not grow up horse-mad. Occasionally his parents would take him to a hobby farm near their home outside of Sarnia, Ont., and young Tim would marvel at the beautiful, muscular animals and wonder, as he fed them apples, “How do they get so strong on a vegetarian diet?”
But that was about it, really. He knew about the horses he’d seen in Westerns, and the ones in picture books, but they just seemed like mildly interesting relics of the past. He could not have known that his research as a professional historian would show him, decades later, that these apple-munching giants had shaped the world in unimaginable ways.
If not for horses, we probably wouldn’t be wearing pants. Or smoking pot. Or speaking the languages we do. Or have vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus. These are just some of the extraordinary conclusions that Winegard, a professor of history at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, draws in his new book The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.
“The lightning strike of the domestication of the horse and its Swiss-Army-knife uses fundamentally changed the scope of human civilization and our entire future,” Winegard said in an interview from his home in Colorado.
That “lightning strike” truly was the match that set the world alight. It seems difficult to believe now, but horses had nearly gone extinct after the last Ice Age, when forests replaced the grasslands they grazed. But about 5,000 years ago, some still existed in an area called the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, in present-day Ukraine and Kazakhstan. There, as Winegard envisions it, some bold village youth made friends with a horse, perhaps feeding it an apple, perhaps rising to the taunts of his friends and jumping on the horse’s back.
Suddenly the perimeter of human existence had grown exponentially: Where we could only have walked as far as our feet would take us, now we could travel a hundred miles a day, plow a field, drive a chariot and make war on an enemy. Humans being humans, horse-led conquest followed almost as soon as that first village lad tamed his first horse.
Language and knowledge and even fashion spread as fast as horses could run. Take pants, for example. “I mean, pants are not very comfortable,” Winegard says. “We had people wearing togas and kilts and sarongs and dresses and breezy robes. But try to ride a horse with one of those, and you’ll quickly realize, if you’re male or female, that this is not the ideal garment.”
Smoking cannabis, too, spread along with the nomadic Scythians, who were among the first communities to harness the power of the horse. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about their pot parties in the fifth century BCE: “They get intoxicated from the smoke, and then they throw more fruit on to the fire and get even more intoxicated, until they eventually stand up and dance, and burst into song.”
But the equine revolution did not just result in high times – it led to bloodshed. The communities that were rich in horse power, from ancient China and Assyria to Indigenous plains nations in North America, were able to conquer and expand their territories. There was one aspect that was particularly fascinating to Winegard, who trained as a military historian and served in the Canadian Armed Forces. And that was the way that horse power would come to be detrimental in wartime, with the advance of mechanization.
The Second World War, for example, might have turned out much differently if the Nazis hadn’t relied so heavily on horse power. Or, as Winegard puts it, the German Army was “oats, not oil … ponies instead of Panzers.” By 1944, the Allied forces were 100-per-cent mechanized, while the Germans still mainly used horses for transport. It would prove to be their undoing in the terrible battles of the Eastern Front. “Their heavy use of horses helped the Allies win the war,” Winegard says.
This was not the only way that horses came to the rescue of humans (in this case, inadvertently). Our modern sanitation systems were developed in part as a reaction to the towering piles of dung that malodorously filled every city in the 19th century. (Brooklyn’s famous brownstones, with their tall entry steps, were designed to keep residents above the slop and stink.) As well, horses were the sources of antibody serums for vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus. An “ungainly, tousled” Toronto horse called Brick Top is credited with producing enough anti-tetanus serum to treat 15,000 Canadian soldiers during the First World War.
All of this was unknown to Winegard when he started his research. He was thinking about ideas to follow up his bestselling book Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, when he drove past a group of children walking down the street, who were overtaken by a rider on horseback. It made him think of the chain of human progress: walking, riding, driving.
While his knowledge of individual horses had been limited to equine celebrities like Alexander the Great’s war steed, Bucephalus, and Mr. Ed, he soon grew fond of the personalities he discovered along the way, like the Duke of Wellington’s battle mount, Copenhagen. “At the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington spent 17 hours straight on Copenhagen,” Winegard says. “When he finally dismounted, he patted him on the nose and said, ‘Good job.’ And Copenhagen bit him. After 17 hours of combat, he was like: forget that.”
While the combustion engine may have overtaken the four-legged machine, Winegard points out the central role horses still have in our lives: in sport and recreation, as therapy animals, but also as tools used by police forces to control crowds and quell riots. It’s that last role that really highlights what horses have meant to humans over the millennia that we’ve worked together: “People love horses,” Winegard says. “And they don’t want to hurt them, but they also don’t want to be hurt by them.” The horse-human partnership might not change world history anymore, but it flourishes to this day.
