Your Horse Guide

Let us start with a little history and background of the horse...
One of the first true horse species was the tiny Hyracotherium, also known as eohippus, "the dawn horse". In the course of roughly a million years, horses evolved from leaf-eating forest-dwellers into fast grass-eating inhabitants of the Great Plains. Horse evolution was characterized by a reduction in the number of toes, from 5 per foot, to 3 per foot, to only 1 toe per foot. The genus Equus, to which all living equids belong, evolved a few million years ago. The earliest evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from Central Asia and dates to approximately 4,000 BCE.

Wild animals, whose ancestors have never undergone domestication, are distinct from feral animals, who had domesticated ancestors but now live in the wild. Several populations of feral horses exist, including those in the West of the United States and Canada (often called "mustangs") and in parts of Australia ("brumbies") and New Zealand ("Kaimanawa horses"). Isolated feral populations are often named for their geographic location; in Namiba feral animals known as Namib Desert Horses live in the desert, while the Sable Island Horses are resident on Sable Island, Canada. Feral horses may provide useful insights into the behavior of ancestral wild horses.

The Icelandic horse (pony-sized but called a horse) provides an opportunity to compare contemporary and historical breed appearances and behaviour. Introduced by the Vikings into Iceland, Icelandic horses did not subsequently undergo the intensive selective breeding that took place in the rest of Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, and consequently bear a closer resemblance to pre-Medieval breeds. The Icelandic horse has a four-beat gait called the "tölt", which equates to the rack exhibited by several American gaited breeds.

Horses come in various sizes and shapes. The draft breeds can top 20 hands (80 inches, 2 metres) while the smallest miniature horses can stand as low as 5.2 hands (22 inches, 0.56 metres). The Patagonian Fallabella, usually considered the smallest horse in the world, compares in size to a German Shepherd Dog.

Several schools of thought exist to explain how this range of size and shape came about. These schools grew up reasoning from the type of dentition and from the horses' outward appearance. One school, which we can call the "Four Foundations", suggests that the modern horse evolved from two types of early domesticated pony and two types of early domesticated horse; the differences between these types account for the differences in type of the modern breeds. A second school -- the "Single Foundation" -- holds only one breed of horse underwent domestication, and it diverged in form after domestication through human selective breeding (or in the case of feral horses, through ecological pressures). Finally, certain geneticists have started evaluating the DNA and mitochondrial DNA to construct family trees.