In praise of neigh-sayers

Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book about the history of man’s partnership with horses, gives us many more than 13 ways of looking at a horse. Horses have had ‘more meanings than bones’, he writes. And those meanings have been central to the human experience since pre-history. Evidence from the abraded teeth of horse skeletons indicates that man first slipped a rope into a horse’s mouth as long ago as 3,700 BCE.

Horses are what Raulff calls ‘converters’: they can unlock the energy in plants and make it available for man’s use. As draught animals they were ‘oat-powered engines’, a single horse delivering roughly seven times the power of a single man. As mounts, they were the first thing that gave us the experience of speed — opening up space to hunting, to new forms of warfare, to colonisation and in the end, to politics.