Wild About Horses Page 6

  In Canada, few wild horses remain. The foothills of Alberta still shelter several hundred, and scattered bands have found refuge in northern Saskatchewan, the southern Yukon and central British Columbia. One place where they exist in significant numbers is on Sable Island, about sixty miles off the east coast of Nova Scotia.

  A sandy spit some twenty-five miles long and less than a mile wide, the treeless island offers no shade in summer. The only food — coarse dune grasses, wild pea plants and low shrubs — is plentiful in summer, hard to find in winter. From winter gales, from bone-chilling fog, there is almost no shelter. Waves here can reach sixty feet high and the salt water washes far inland.

  Various theories abound as to how horses came to be here. Did they swim ashore from a French ship that foundered in the 1600s? The “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” they called the island. Many hundreds of ships and many thousands of sailors fell prey to its hidden sandbars and terrible wind — so many, in fact, that a rescue service was established on the island between 1801 and 1958. Did a lighthouse keeper import the horses as company? Did a Boston merchant bring them as food for shipwrecked sailors? The only certainty is that horses have been on Sable Island for hundreds of years.

  During storms the horses huddle in circles, rumps to the incessant wind. Blown sand has reduced the windows of abandoned houses to frosted panes. You wonder how horses survive in such a hostile habitat. Some do not. Records of herd numbers date from 1891, when up to a hundred horses died. More recently, in 1958, half the herd of three hundred perished.

  Moved by their plight, the Canadian government dropped bales of hay from planes, but the horses — apparently wary of the human scent that pervaded the bales — declined the food. A plan in the late 1950s to remove the survivors and sell them to the highest bidder was greeted with such outrage that then prime minister John Diefenbaker issued a proclamation. It read, in part: “The horses of Sable Island and their progeny will not be removed, but left unmolested to roam wild and free as has been their custom for centuries.”

  In 1979, a harsh winter again halved the herd to 150. Numbers are back up again but oil and natural gas discoveries nearby may finally be the horses’ undoing.

  One of the few remaining wild herds in the world untampered by human intervention, Sable Island horses are also — no coincidence — among the toughest horses in the world: sure-footed, fast and blessed with uncommon stamina. They have the look of Barbs, the chunky horses seen in North Africa. Their only enemy is nature, which fiercely and relentlessly culls the weak. I remember a photograph of an old, feeble stallion on the island, taking refuge during a summer storm behind what remained of an old building. That summer would be the last one for the old stallion.

  He would leave a bold legacy. We should let nature continue its course on the island. One day on the mainland we may have need of such quality bloodlines.

  But will the wild horses endure? And will the delicate ecosystems where they have found refuge last if the horses do?

  One reason given for the roundup of wild horses on an artillery range in Alberta in 1994 was concern over a unique sandhills ecosystem. Similarly, wild horses on barrier islands off the eastern American coast are feared to be threatening delicate island ecosystems. Witness a coy headline from 1993 in the New York Times: “Is Misty of Chincoteague leveling dune grass?” New research shows that horses reduce the number and variety of plants, and with it the islands’ defenses against erosion.

  It is a tangled problem. If authorities let horse numbers increase, the horses will overwhelm the dunes and trample the grasses. The result could be “a sandbox with horses,” as one critic put it. A geologist argued that “if a developer damaged these islands the way the horses do, he would be put in jail.” On the other hand, island horses have many admirers. Those who have read Misty of Chincoteague as children often go as adults to watch the annual ritual: the roundup by firefighters, the culled horses swimming the channel, the auction that Marguerite Henry’s novel made famous.

  It is important that both horses and island grasslands endure. The sight of wild horses on land that is more or less theirs is an illusion, but one that fosters hope.

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” the saying goes. Accept charity with grace and without question. I thought of that saying recently when I chanced across an unpublished article by Susan Blair Seward. She described how she came to own a mustang called Utah, a fiery little horse rounded up for adoption by the BLM and later taken to a horse shelter in Leesburg, Virginia, and from there to Seward’s home in Tidewater in 1993. Utah’s first owner could no longer afford to keep the horse, but she was an experienced horsewoman who knew mustangs. She had treated him with kindness and gentleness and gained his trust. I liked how Seward put it: “Utah fell into a pudding.”

  Seward had always been something of a horse snob, used to riding sleek Thoroughbred hunters. Her friends dismissed mustangs, much as they scorned the alley cat and the pound mutt in favor of purebreds with papers and haughty bloodlines. But something about rugged little Utah touched Seward, something beyond words. Though saddling him in the beginning took three brave people, somehow this woman knew that trust lay just around the corner. She was right. Seward never regretted buying Utah and she was struck by his toughness. She had to smile when her friends’ pedigreed mounts succumbed to foot problems, breathing disorders and other common ailments unknown to Utah and his wild kin.

  Seward wrote with eloquence: “There is a law of genetics which, in the hands of God and nature, is practised with unerring certainty: only the strong survive. Utah’s flint-hard hooves, alert, wide-set eyes and iron constitution are no accident; they are the creation of the perfect by the divine.”

  2.5 Though diplomacy typically governs horse society, these mustang stallions fighting over a harem are savage in battle. (photo credit 2.5)

  Sometimes Seward laments the fate of Utah, a creature born in freedom. A little sadly, she takes out a map of the state of Utah and traces with her finger the tiny town of Milford, where the mustang caught his last glimpse of home — “his big world of hills, rocks and sky.”

  Still, Seward thought, this horse had become her partner and friend. During one gallop across a great field, with the whistling wind and the pounding of his hooves the only sounds, Seward felt as though she were flying. She remembered a passage in the Koran on Allah’s creation of the horse: “He picked up the golden sand and cast it to the wind, saying, ‘Thou shalt fly without wings.’ ”

  It seems terribly important to some of us that the wild horse endure. Richard Adams, the author of Traveller and Watership Down, once put it rather bluntly. “For our own sakes,” he wrote, “we all need to feel and understand the value to the world of the wild horses, those paragons of natural power, grace and beauty. I will go further: we cannot afford to do without them.”

  Jay F. Kirkpatrick, a wildlife biologist who has spent twenty-three years of his life observing wild horse herds all over the world, including the Red Desert of Wyoming, would perhaps agree with both Seward and Adams. This man is also a specialist in reproductive physiology and his work on what looks to be a safe and efficient method of birth control for the herds may hold the key to their continued survival. He is a scientist, but one not immune to the inherent beauty of horses in the wild.

  In a book called Into the Wind, Kirkpatrick writes movingly of what it has meant to him to watch mustangs grazing in the Pryor Mountains, or brumbies gathering at the bill-abongs of Australia, or a young mare emerging with a foal after hiding in the Book Cliffs of Utah.

  To see a stallion and a mare affectionately groom each other, amid the man-height sagebrush of Wyoming’s silent Red Desert, fills me with awe. And, if there is anything more beautiful on this earth than standing alone in an Assateague marsh in a cold March sunset, watching a band of brown and white pintos graze peacefully while snow geese glide overhead and sika deer gracefully prance through on their way to some favorite feeding place, I want to discover it befor
e my own journey is finished. I am richer, beyond description, because of these events.

  And that is the value of the wild horse.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE HORSE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  For 98 percent of the last 6,000 years, the horse was the fastest vehicle available to man. It is no wonder it represents an ancient archetype for combined power and speed.

  HAROLD B. BARCLAY,

  The Role of the Horse in Man’s Culture

  TO UNDERSTAND THE unique and powerful kinship that humans feel with horses, we must look past mythology to history — where the answers to large questions often lie in any case.

  The age-old chronicle of the horse is not just about the horse in war, though a strong case could be made along those lines (and thus chapter 5 is devoted entirely to the war horse). The horse through time has served us in innumerable ways: horse meat kept our ancestors’ bellies full, horse dung fueled their fires, horsepower pulled their wagons across continents, cleared land and pulled plows. The horse’s spirit granted the animal a place among the gods, and the horse’s regal bearing put Equus in the funeral processions of rulers and at the coronation of kings and queens. The horse’s speed thrilled and entertained us and even helped deliver the mail; the horse’s exquisite form shaped our notions of beauty. For millennia, poets and warriors, priests and commoners, took sustenance and inspiration from the horse.

  3.1 Circus performer May Wirth (who seems to be head over heels in love with horses) on Joe, 1915. (photo credit 3.1)

  As I probed the chronology of the horse, I was struck by the pure breadth of it: fifty-five million years of equine history. By comparison, the six thousand or so years of human partnership with the horse, and even the one million years of existence that Homo sapiens can lay claim to, look more like a wink in time. I was also astonished by how little humans have truly understood the horse, a fact best appreciated when you consider what our ancestors mistakenly fed the horse through the ages.

  Another message I took from the pages of history is the notion that horse and human were somehow meant to be partnered: certain physical and social aspects pointed the horse in the direction of humans. Some would call it fate.

  “There is nothing new under the sun,” the saying goes, though its kernel of truth has come to be buried. Synonymous these days with world weariness, the phrase derives from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Wise King Solomon warns against the ephemeral pleasures and vanities of the world in one of the Bible’s most poetic sections. (Song writer Pete Seeger some decades ago adapted Solomon’s words as lyrics: “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season … a time to kill, a time to heal … a time to laugh, a time to weep …”)

  In the world of horses, it might also seem that under the sun there can be nothing new. Or at least nothing more to be written. One estimate suggests that since the time of the Greek horse trainer Xenophon, a few hundred years before the birth of Christ, some forty thousand books have been written about the horse. Likely at least that many instructional guides, anthologies and horse biographies have also found their way into print. More recently, the surging interest in horses has spawned yet another round of books (and CDs and videos) on how to ride them, groom them, house them, shoe and show them, stretch them, heal them, breed them, select, train and touch them, feed and fathom them, jump them, even how to pamper them.

  Through time, the great outpouring of words helped promulgate some bizarre notions. The Romans, for example, believed that mares, more than any other animal, loved their offspring. Almost two thousand years ago, the poet Pliny the Elder wrote that “a love poison called horse frenzy is found in the forehead of horses at birth, the size of a dried fig, black in color.” This the mare eats after dropping her foal, he warned, and if anyone takes it, she will refuse to suckle the foal and the thief will descend into madness.

  Through much of history (famously, perversely) wrong information on horses has been passed on, or new gaffes invented. The proof of the pudding, as it were, lies in what we have fed these creatures we claim to know and admire.

  Consider, for example, the equine high life as envisioned by another Roman of Pliny’s time, a certain demented emperor named Caligula. He was properly known as Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (A.D. 12–41), and only behind his back did Romans of the day call him Caligula (it means “Little Boots,” for he often wore caligae, or soldier’s boots). His very name now conjures the decline of the Roman Empire.

  Keener on games and horses than on managing the realm, Caligula built a huge amphitheater and filled it with water so that mock naval battles could be held as entertainments. He was like a little boy playing war in his bathtub, but he quickly squandered his fabulous wealth on this epic tub and other toys. At first generous, he later banished or murdered his relatives (save his sister Drusilla, whom he may have bedded) and for his amusement would have enemies tortured and slain before him as he dined.

  He was also mad about horses, in particular one chariot horse — Incitatus, meaning “spurred on.” Caligula made him a citizen of the Roman Empire, gave him a gem-studded collar, had a horse blanket sewn for him of royal purple (the emperor’s color) and insisted that his oats be dipped in gold.

  In a stable fashioned of marble eighteen servants waited on Incitatus. They fed him, or tried to, the things that Caligula imagined his precious horse would enjoy — mice dipped in butter, raw mussels, marinated squid and, of course, those golden oats.

  Worse was yet to come. Caligula promoted the horse from citizen to priest and held a banquet to mark the occasion. Distinguished senators arrived to find Incitatus sitting on his haunches and wearing his jewels and a white bib. But when a platter of roast chicken was presented to the horse, Incitatus spooked, the table crashed and the banqueters fled.

  Caligula had himself declared a god and was soon assassinated — the fate of many, but especially loony, rulers. Incitatus, erstwhile citizen and cleric, reverted to mere horse and thereafter was spared gilded oats, oily mice and chicken cacciatore.

  Food for horses, it seems, is food for thought. Horses in ancient India were fed peas boiled in sugar and butter, root vegetables steeped in honey and, on military campaigns, wine as a sedative. Romans fed their horses a supplement of sparrow eggs. In the Algerian oases, horses ate dates and learned to spit out the pits. When water was scarce, horses were sometimes fed camel milk.

  Legend has it that the Japanese hero Yokoyama Shogen fed his mount Onikage chopped-up humans. In medieval times in northern and western Europe, bread was offered horses when fodder ran scarce; beer, curry and oysters have all been fed to horses. Two seventeenth-century French noblemen would feed their horses three hundred eggs each before a race, convinced the yolks gave their mounts an advantage in speed. The Tungus, who live in Manchuria, may yet believe that the horse is at heart a carnivore. They start young horses on salted fish and move on to raw meat.

  The brutal game of bagai, or buzkashi — a kind of equestrian free-for-all in which the object is to maintain possession, at whatever cost, of a goat carcass — was played by Mongol riders in the days of Genghis Khan. Today, a somewhat more refined version of the game is played in Afghanistan, where it has become the national sport. Full-time buzkashi players employ their own servants and grooms. Horses for this sport get strict training and exercise and are fed the usual alfalfa, oats, hay — and sometimes in winter, eggs and sheep fat.

  Today, Western trainers strive to give their horses an edge, sometimes by adjusting the feed. Some trainers (like those buzkashi grooms dropping sheep fat in the food bin) give horses extra fat in the belief that it offers an anaerobic boost. Another Tungus-like tactic is to feed the horse creatine, a substance found in the juices of flesh. If this all turns out to be a mistake, we can simply add gristle and blood juice to history’s already long and fatuous equine-menu.

  Finally, certain trainers have taken to feeding their horses up to a pound of bicarbonate of soda just before a race by dropping a tube through the nose and
into the stomach. The practice began with Australian middle-distance runners in the 1980s and was quickly adopted by some horse trainers. The thinking is this: use an acid buffer to neutralize acid buildup in muscle cells and thus reduce fatigue. Less fatigue, more speed. As with other supplements, scientific studies show no genuine improvement in a horse’s performance, and indeed the practice may be harmful to the horse’s respiration. The baking soda “milkshake” is banned worldwide and tracks go on testing for it, convinced its use would otherwise proliferate.

  Another recent fad has trainers feeding Thoroughbreds so-called muscle builders made from rice oil. Weight lifters have long used this anabolic agent (not a steroid) to increase muscle mass. “Frankly,” one equine nutritionist told me, “I think it’s manufacturers trying to sell one more thing to horse people, who will try almost anything if they think it will give them an edge over the next trainer.”

  However misguided, humans have always valued horses. Right from the very beginnings of domestication, horses received better treatment than any other animal. The oldest surviving book on horse care, written by a Mesopotamian trainer named Kikkuli, reveals that in 1360 B.C. horses did indeed get royal treatment: they were bathed, massaged with butter and fed a luxurious diet of grass and grain.

  In late nineteenth-century Wales, horses were regarded as the most valuable stock. In his book, The Role of the Horse in Man’s Culture the anthropologist Harold B. Barclay, now retired from the University of Alberta, notes that horses were served the best food and a wagoner (a servant encharged with driving the farm wagon) who stole grain for his horses was considered an asset to the farm. The wagoner was the aristocrat among farm laborers. The farm owner’s eldest son, meanwhile, had the privilege of working with the horses; the second son, the cattle; the third son, the sheep. Significantly, the farmers spoke Welsh to the cows (who got Welsh names) and English to the horses (who got aristocratic English names such as Prince, Captain or Duke). English, of course, was the language of the conquerors.