@pameluke / pameluke.tumblr.com
Heard y’all like horses!
[ID: Illustration of a pale grey horse with a dark smouldering head from which a great deal of smoke erupts. The smoke climbs onto a very dark stormy sky, the colors slowly blending together. The foreground is made up of lots of dried prairie grasses.]
happy birthday to all the tbs in the southern hemisphere!
Special Event: All Horses’ Birthday (Southern Hemisphere only)
Absolutely fascinated by how the original belgian draft horse, the brabant, just looks like your usual heavy draft horse:
And then American breeders decided to….. improve….. it:
sir that thing looks like it’s made of plastic
I feel like American breeders just have a tendency to do this. Behold, the French Percheron vs the American Percheron
The British Shetland Pony vs the American Shetland Pony
And it’s not just horses. Compare the English Cocker Spaniel with the American Cocker Spaniel
They’re making them look how Disney would draw them.
Mustang (Equus ferus caballus) in Oregon, U.S.
Elling William Gollings (1878 - 1932)
Oil on canvas 98 x 120 cm (39 x 47 in.)
On the northwest Belgian coast, there is a little known tradition: shrimp fishing on horseback. The activity consists of what its name describes: fishing shrimp on a horse. In the 15th century, shrimp fishing on horseback was still practised on the North Sea coasts in France, the Netherlands and even the South of England. This activity represented an extra revenue needed for the household. Nowadays there is only one place in which it is still ongoing: Oostduinkerke, a sub-municipality of the municipality of Koksijde.
The Black Stallion (1979) Dir. Caroll Ballard
The Akhal-Teke is a horse breed from Turkmenistan, where they are a national emblem. They have a reputation for speed and endurance, intelligence, and a distinctive metallic sheen. The shiny coat of palominos and buckskins led to their nickname “Golden Horses”. These horses are adapted to severe climatic conditions and are thought to be one of the oldest existing horse breeds. (Source)
i know i talk a lot about the relationship between humans and animals in ancient rome and i’m constantly very emotional about it but i NEED you all to look at this part of a mosaic of a race horse named polidoxus that says “whether you win or not, we love you, polidoxus”
Photograph: Tatyana Deryabina/University of Porthmouth
I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?
gettingvetted here.
Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.
In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”
Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”
Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.
God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.
Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.
“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”
And that’s all you need to know about horses.
Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia
Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.
My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:
Horses don’t got enough toes.
So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:
They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.
But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well. Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides. Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM. So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:
The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.
When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync. But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates. It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.
When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that. But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia. Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.
ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.
ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”. The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.
TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.
we all laugh at horse girl andy but she is genuinely nearly a thousand years older than the the earliest archaeological evidence of domestication (in the botai culture in kazakhstan in 3500 BCE) because she is at least 6,500 years old and tracing back to the botai and other kazakhstani sites, it would leave 1,000+ year gap. she definitely had a formative hand in the domestication of the horse especially as a nomadic steppe individual. she also likely would have come from a sredny stog (circa. 4,500 to 3,500 BCE), dnieper-donets (circa. 4-5th millennium BCE) or khvalynsk cultures (circa. 5,000 to 3,500 BCE), to be realistic, as they are found to be europoid (and thus most likely to be close to what we would consider the same facial features and skin tone as Charlize Theron).
however, the sredny-stog culture has the earliest archaeological evidence of phase 2 (around 4,000 to 3,500 BCE) of horse domestication in the form of cheek pieces but no explicit horse riding at this time. it’s possible she grew up with horses as mainly for use to transport foods but there’s also the possibility she could have been some of the first people to actually ride a horse. who’s to say! but i do know she’s the OG horse girl and writing he as such isn’t far fetched because quite a lot of steppe and nomadic cultures were heavily involved in horses in the rituals and their cultures, to the point that they had explicitly horse based names, as seen with a lot of Greek names.
TL;DR: write andy with horse experience she has nearly 6,000 years of it and her life would have been revolving around horses for a very, very long time.
absolutely no one is interested BUT some interesting reads on the peoples of the eurasian steppe and europe in regards to horses and their domestication for those of you who might be:
Anthony, D.W. & Brown, D.R. 2000, “Eneolithic horse exploitation in the Eurasian steppes: diet, ritual and riding”, Antiquity, vol. 74, no. 283, pp. 75.
Anthony, D.W. & Brown, D.R. 1991, “The origins of horseback riding”, Antiquity, vol. 65, no. 246, pp. 22.
Olsen, Sandra L & Zeder, Melinda A, 2019. Early Horse Domestication On The Eurasian Steppe. In Documenting Domestication. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 245–270.
Bendrey, R. 2012, “From Wild Horses to Domestic Horses: a European Perspective”, World Archaeology, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 135–157.
Niles, J.D. 2016, “Hawks, Horses, and Huns: The Impact of Peoples of the Steppe on the Folk Cultures of Northern Europe”, Western Folklore, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 133-164.
here’s a cool artwork of a Scythian horse recreation so i can tie it all back to andromache the scythian who is too old to be a scythian and wont say it
look how cool that is!
Somebody is interested. Please enjoy this collection of historic horses of Eurasian steppe cultures:
my 2021 goal is to really work on my art, and that means back to basics, so here is a little study of an Akhal-Teke horse
1st image - Jerdess - In the Countryside
2nd image - Rosie Prosser - whispers
Graceful akhal-teke horses by Daria Kamisaruk
