Interesting Facts and Information about Horses

Interesting Facts about Horses

• The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years.
• Humans began to domesticate horses around 4000 BC, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BC.
• Horses communicate in various ways, including vocalizations such as nickering, squealing or whinnying; touch, through mutual grooming or nuzzling; smell; and body language.
• Ear position, head height, and body language may change to reflect emotional status as well.
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• Horses are creatures of habit and have excellent long-term memory, which makes consistent training extremely important to the horse.
• Horses are able to sleep both standing up and lying down. They are able to doze and enter light sleep while standing, an adaptation from life as a prey animal in the wild. Laying down makes an animal more vulnerable to predators.
• Unlike humans, horses do not need a solid, unbroken period of sleep time. They obtain needed sleep by means of many short periods of rest.
• Horses require approximately two and a half hours of sleep, on average, in a 24-hour period. Most of this sleep occurs in many short intervals of about 15 minutes each.
• Horses must lie down to reach REM sleep. They only have to lie down for an hour or two every few days to meet their minimum REM sleep requirements.
• Horses sleep better when in groups because some animals will sleep while others stand guard to watch for predators. A horse kept entirely alone may not sleep well because its instincts are to keep a constant eye out for danger.
• Depending on breed, management and environment, the modern domestic horse has a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years
• The oldest verifiable record was "Old Billy", a 19th-century horse that lived to the age of 62.
• Horses usually range in height from 56 to 64 inches and can weigh from 380 to 550 kilograms.
• The largest horse in recorded history was probably a Shire horse named Mammoth, who was born in 1848. He stood 86.5 inches high and his peak weight was estimated at 1,500 kilograms.
• Often, a horse is classified first by its coat colour, before breed or sex.
• Gestation period is approximately 340 days, with an average range 320–370 days, and usually results in one foal, twins are rare.
• Foals are generally weaned from their mothers between four and six months of age.
• Horses have total 205 bones.
• The average horse weigh is 500 kg.
• Horses are adapted to grazing. In an adult horse, there are 12 incisors at the front of the mouth, adapted to biting off the grass or other vegetation.
• There are 24 teeth adapted for chewing, the premolars and molars, at the back of the mouth.
• Therefore, compared to humans, they have a relatively small stomach but very long intestines to facilitate a steady flow of nutrients.
• A 450-kilogram horse will eat 7 to 11 kilograms of food per day and, under normal use, drink 38 litres to 45 litres of water.
• They have the largest eyes of any land mammal, and are lateral-eyed, meaning that their eyes are positioned on the sides of their heads. This means that horses have a range of vision of more than 350°, with approximately 65° of this being binocular vision and the remaining 285° monocular vision.
• Horses have excellent day and night vision, but they have two-color, or dichromatic vision; their color vision is somewhat like red-green color blindness in humans, where certain colors, especially red and related colors, appear as a shade of green.
• Their sense of smell is much batter than of humans.
• A horse's hearing power is good, and the pinna of each ear can rotate up to 180°, giving the potential for 360° hearing without having to move the head.
• The gallop averages of horses is 40 to 48 kilometres per hour, but the world record for a horse galloping over a short, sprint distance is 88 kilometres per hour.
• In the past, horses were considered unintelligent, with no abstract thinking ability, unable to generalize, and driven primarily by a herd mentality. However, modern studies show that they perform a number of cognitive tasks on a daily basis, meeting mental challenges that include food procurement and social system identification.
• Recent studies even suggest horses are able to count if the quantity involved is less than four.
• The earliest known member of the Equidae family was the Hyracotherium, which lived between 45 and 55 million years ago.
• Today, there are more than 300 horse breeds in the world.
• The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that in 2008, there were almost 59,000,000 horses in the world, with around 33,500,000 in the Americas, 13,800,000 in Asia and 6,300,000 in Europe and smaller portions in Africa and Oceania. There are estimated to be 9,500,000 horses in the United States alone.
• In a 2004 "poll" conducted by Animal Planet, more than 50,000 viewers from 73 countries voted for the horse as the world's 4th favourite animal.
• Although machinery has replaced horses in many parts of the world, an estimated 100 million horses, donkeys and mules are still used for agriculture and transportation in less developed areas.
• This number includes around 27 million working animals in Africa alone.
• The horse also appears in the 12-year cycle of animals in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar.
• Horse blood used to make medicines for Drug edicts.
• Horsehide leather has been used for boots, gloves, jackets, baseballs and baseball gloves.
• The tail hair of horses can be used for making bows for string instruments such as the violin, viola, cello, and double bass.
• They can consume approximately 2% to 2.5% of their body weight in dry feed each day.
• Horses require a plentiful supply of clean water, a minimum of 45 litters per day.
• In modern times, Sugar Puff, who had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest living pony, died in 2007 at age 56.
• The current record holder for the world's smallest horse is Thumbelina, a fully mature miniature horse affected by dwarfism. She is 17 inch tall and weighs 26 kg.