Horses | The Mules

What is a Feral Horse?

A feral horse is a domesticated horse that has gone back to the wild, they could have either run away or perhaps be descendant from domesticated horses. They are not true wild horses as they have come from domesticated horses at some point in their ancestry. It is possible to re-domesticate a feral horse if found young enough and given enough time. Many of these horses are genetically different than wild horses since there is a two chromosome difference between Wild Horses and Feral Horses. However they can still interbreed, and many view this as contamination of the natural wild horse stock, since it changed the behaviors and the overall communities of wild horses.

Feral horses usually live in groups called bands or herds, and sometimes mobs; they are usually a small group led by one dominant mare who is the leader of the group. The group is usually made up of mares, and their foal which are of both sexes. Immature horses who are not yet ready to go on their own also have both sexes mixed within the group. There are many types of feral horses that have arose from their escapes and breeding in the wild. They are the Mustang, the Brumby, the Sorraia, the Banker Horse, the Kaimanawa horse, the Sable Island horse, and quite a few others. For a feral population to remain genetically viable there must be between one hundred and fifty to two hundred feral horses within the environment. However often times there can be many more, such as the Mustang, who’s numbers nearly topped at two million, but due to abuse and hunting for pet food, have been reduced to twenty thousand or so. They are now a protected species in the United Stated, and harming one is a crime.

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What are Working Horses?

Work horses are horses that are used for work, and are more commonly called draft horses. Work horses have done numerous jobs, from transportation of goods and people across the country in stage coaches, to hauling heavy material that oxen would not be suitable for (or for tradition), for transporting coffins to the graveyards and service in the military as war horses who accompany their rider into battle and serve to make up calvary units. The draft horse is a large horse bred especially for its line of work, they are bred to pull ploughs on farmlands, and were essential for pre-industrial age farming since they could do these tasks and other tasks that required heavy pulling. They are a large but docile and easily trained breed, and are often inter-bred with thoroughbred horses. There are many working horse breeds, such as the American Cream, Ardennes, Irish Draught, Clydesdale, Breton, Boulonnais, Belgian, Percheron, Shire, Sullfolk Punch and the Gypsy Vanner Horse.

There is also a lighter breed and type of working horses, which are called the harness horses, and are usually lighter and smaller but still used in many of the same capacities as the working horses. Harness horse breeds are sometimes taken from sporting horses or otherwise horses not normally thought of as working - some of these horses are the Oldenburg, the Friesian, the Cleveland Bay, the Hackney horse, and even some warmbloods and in some cases even Thoroughbred horses may be used as harness horses - although their temperaments may not be the most desirable when compared to the large docile horses of the normal working horse breeds.

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What are Sporting Horses?

Sporting horses are used in a number of sporting events, why there’s horse racing 9which is by far the most obvious and lucrative - involving nearly billions of dollars annually in gambling and betting, along with breeding and siring good horses - some racehorses can command prices well above a million dollars, and their children can even be worth as much with the assumption that they will be just as physically endowed as their parents. Super-colts are colts bred from two award winning parents, and can command prices double that of a horse with just one award winning parent). Warmblood horses were specifically developed for use as sport horses - especially for show horses and jumping horses. The most popular breed for sporting horses are thoroughbred, although other breeds can be acceptable if exceptional for their breed - some that have been seen are American Saddlebred used in sports, American Quarter Horses (bred for sprinting and the most popular horse in the United States with millions registered), the Arabian Horse, and the Morgan Horse - while there are many others that could be mentioned that also do well in sporting but are not known for it.

Traditionally successful horses are later turned into stud horses once they outlive their glory days (although a few rare successful un-retirements have been seen). They serve to further the population and fund their owners by producing highly valued offspring that are direct descendants, and many of these descendants go on to win races for much of their lives. One example would be Jaklin Klugman, an American Thoroughbred racehorse who lived from 1977 to 1996 . He was owned by actor Jack Klugman (famous for his sporting horse enthusiasm) which won several awards, including the Kentucky Derby (holy grail) in 1980. Jaklin sired a horse names Sky jack, who won the 2002 Hollywood Gold Cup. However Jaklin died in 1996 from a ruptured aorta on the ranch it was named after and resided in.

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What is Horse Therapy?

Horse therapy directed at humans is a type of therapy that involves the horse with good manners, and it becomes the part of a disabled, injured, or emotionally damaged person’s treatment through trust, mobility training, and other benefits that are varied in nature. Sometimes it can be used to reduce loneliness, and it can encourage nurturance, responsibility, and adherence to a schedule. Horse therapy can improve a humans motor skills, wheelchair skills, and equilibrioception and balance depending on their physical ailments, whilst also can improve verbal interactions, attention skills, recreation skills, self esteem, reduce anxiety and fears, and reduce loneliness. With all people it can increase a vocabulary used in the horse world, aid in memory that is short or long term damaged, and improve concepts of horses, sizes, and colors when it comes to varying shades of horses, to major color differences in those who are recovering from trauma or have mental illnesses. It can also boost someone’s motivation.

When it is a therapy designed for a horse, human interaction can improve trust between humans and horses, and learning of the horse as well as the human, as the horse will learn new people and how to react to those humans who may seem different at first (with those who are uncontrollably verbal or make noises depending on the kinds of disabilities) along with reducing fear of human contraptions (wheelchairs, crutches, and other large unwieldy objects that may be fearful). There is also physical therapy to improve a horses condition from sickness, laminitis, or even bone fractures (that if successfully healed can save the horse, especially if the fracture is in the leg). Horse whispering is a non evasive method of training and rehabilitating horses who have no social skills or have been damaged by bad experiences, and can turn a horses frown upside down (small joke, long faces and such).

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What is Horse Vocabulary?

Well, horses have worked with humans for literally thousands of years, and through that time we have developed a vocabulary with the horse, and a specialized one at that. We have words and language for virtually every horse behavioral train, and anatomical characteristic with an extremely high accuracy as far as that goes. Horses are oft referred to by their coat color while in the field and the genetics of coat colors has been resolved, although some debates continue about the exact finer details. In English a horse is measured in hands, which is usually displayed as “hh” or “h” and it is a way of measuring a horses hight. One hand is usually around four inches, or as defined in English Law, 101.6 millimeters. Heights that are not solidly a hand are then measured in hands and the additional inches that are less than another hand. So a horse that is 15 hands is 60 inches, about a meter and a half in height.

In horse anatomy there are many terms that are related to these special vocabulary terms that may not make much sense to someone who has never been around horses. The back is right behind the withers, where the saddle goes, the chin groove is the part of the head on a horse that is right behind the lower lip, the crest is the upper part of the neck where the mane grows, the cannon is between the knee and the fetlock joint, the frog is the highly elastic wedge shaped mass on the underside of the hoof, the hock is the tarsus of the horse - like the human heel, the mane is the long coarse hair that sprouts from the dorsal ridge on a horses neck, the muscle is the chin and mouth (like a dog) and the splints are bones found on each of the legs, on either side of the cannon bone (there are eight of these bones) and they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.

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What is a Feral Horse?

What are Working Horses?

What are Sporting Horses?

What is Horse Therapy?

What is Horse Vocabulary?

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