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Breeding Strategies
From the time when humans acquired (or were given) tenuous dominion over the horse, they have wittingly and sometimes unwittingly arranged breedings to enhance and to intensify desirable traits in this singular animal. For roughly 250 equine generations, we have striven to assemble bigger, stronger, fleeter, and more refined horses out of the raw materials of bloodstock and bone that nature has provided. Whenever humans have had a particular utility in mind, they have bred to produce horses best adapted for that activity. The domesticated thoroughbred, therefore, is considerably different from the domesticated draft horse. This obvious difference--and the more subtle differences between various breeds of horses--frequently leads to debates about whether some breeds are easier to train than others.
The answer to that question is probably yes," says Houpt. "No one has ever done a quantitative study of trainability of horses across breeds, but I suspect that the so-called cold-blooded horses are more easily trained than the more hot-blooded ones. My guess is also that hot-blooded horses become more attached to people, but that's pure prejudice."
Houpt also believes there may be another reason for observed differences in behavior between breeds. "Since metabolism is heritable," she says, "and since neurotransmitters are precise regulators of behavior, if you have more neurotransmitters in one breed than in another or you have more receptors for a given hormone in one breed, then there are going to be differences in behavior in that breed because of its biochemical make-up. This has not been demonstrated, but there have been enough studies of other facets of the horse--like blood types--that tend to fall out somewhat along breed lines. We can assume that there are differences on the inside of the horse as well as on the outside."
Forever Young
While humans have been busy altering the physiology of the horse--increasing its chest cavity, overall size, lung capacity, and heart--they have wrought emotional changes in the horse, too. These alterations, thought by many to be no less heritable than changes in conformation or type, help to explain the horse's rank as our intimate.
In wild bands, horses, like other animals, mature from the dependent newborn to the independent adult. In domesticity this evolution is truncated. Old Bowser lounging in front of the hearth, for instance, will never become the self-sufficient, stoic, and austere animal that the adult timber wolf is. Nor do we wish Old Bowser to be. We prize, instead, in our domesticated dogs a perpetual state of puppyhood. So, too, with our horses. Accordingly, we have selected for this characteristic--to a greater or lesser extent--from the time that we first took the horse into our camps. Flat-out bad-tempered animals, except in the hands of persons of questionable temperament themselves, have not frequently been given the chance to reproduce. Therefore, the benign, if somewhat flight-prone, temperament of the horse has been burnished by the genetic artisans present within the animals we have summoned to the breeding shed.
During the tenure of our domestication, the horse has evolved from a food source to a beast of burden to a carriage puller to a riding animal. Nevertheless the basic in-herd behavior of the horse does not appear to have changed over the centuries. Nor is there any evidence that domestic horses are smarter than wild ones. "The main difference between the mentality of the modern horse and that of the wild horse prior to domestication," says one observer, "lies in the degree of ability [the domesticated horse] shows in establishing mental contact with its owner, attendant, or rider, and in making adequate response to stimuli quite unknown to its primitive ancestors."
The Horse's Agenda
Because the horse has been little modified by humans in the last 5,000 years except in regard to size and the horse's willingness to listen when we say whoa, one has to wonder if there is not some hidden agenda behind the horse's acquiescence in our designs. And when one observes--as Frederic J. Sautter and John A. Glover do in Behavior, Development, and Training of the Horse,--that the modern horse had reached the limit of adaptation to plains life a million years ago, that suspicion begins to grow. Finally, when one realizes that the horse population in this country has increased in recent years despite the virtual absence of any utilitarian reason for this growth, a question begins to form. Do we not, perhaps, support the horse as much in the business of being equine as the horse supports us in the business of being human? Who, indeed, has domesticated whom?
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Published here by permission of the author.
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