HORSE HISTORY

PROLOGO

God has granted me the inmense happiness of spending the greater part of my life in close association with horses; and I trust that the rest of my life my be spent in the same way. I mean that I have lived largely thanks to horses, with horses always around me, mounting them continually and often risking their livees and mine over many unforgettable years trying to know them intimately and to help them to know me. And I must confess that I would not change this life for any other. I think that, rather than just a “fondness” for horses, the word for what I feel is “passion”: something that lies very deep inside me and, far from declining, seems to increase as the days gallop past. This, I hope, gives me some “credential” for writing the prologue to this beautiful book.

I am more an more convinced that, as regards intrinsic beauty and aesthetic category, there is noting to equal the horse. It is a monument, a statue in living flesh, a painting that moves. The Duke of Regla once said that, for true beauty, the horse came immediately after woman and man. “The horse is of the very nature of man”; they both have “a bone in the heart”; it lacks “bile”: these are among the terms used by my countryman, Pedro Manuel de Zurita, in his “Treatise on training”, published in 1772. Coming down to details, he goes on, horses love to have their eyes cleaned by hand; a horse’s hair stuck in a flower-pot will keep flies away from the stables, etc., etc. From time to time Zurita gives us some half-truths, such as his opinion that “there is no such thing as a good horseman on a bad horse”. And I say “half-truths” because a good horseman, even on a bad horse, not only improves his mount’s performance but shows his own execellence at once.

Buffon started unhesitatingly that of all animals the horse was the once that possessed the most elegant proportions between the different parts of the body, while Cuvier said that the horse was probably mankind’s noblest conquest – not that I agree with his “probably”; if “is” the noblest, without a doubt. Thanks to the horse, that faithful friend and generous ally, man was able to move about the world more quickly, conquering it and establishing communication with his fellows, until the “iron horse” of steam appeared. And even then, and since then, we find the potential of all these motors measured by the power of the hose!. Every time I hear people say that some car has this or that “horsepower”, I cannot repress a twinge of nostalgia. In the end, however, no matter how many “hp herds” may be galloping all over the world, as José María Pemán wrote, “the horse always holds a final trump card. You can win a battle with tanks, but the victorious general, if he has any sense, will lead the victory parade on a horse, that distillation of aesthetic achievements and historic filtrations”.

In the “dawn of life” on our planet, long before man, Eohippus mada its appearance in the late Eocene epoch – a tiny toy horse, as it were, about one foot tall. After that, over a period of about 55 million years and in America – its original home, as was discerned by Huxley and later proved by the evolution of the brain in Tertiary fossils – these animals gradually grew larger. Mesohippus, for instance, with some three fingers more in height, was about the size of sheep; Parahippus reached a height of three feet; Merychippus was the first to abandon the forests for the prairies; and Pliohippus, the first truly hooved horse, stood about 10 hands period that marked modern Shetland pony. And finally we come to Pleshippus, ni the Pliocene period that marked the end of the Tertiary period, which was a horse very similar to our modern Eqqus, but nomadic in extreme – a real “sevenleaguer”, in fact, who some seven million years ago quickly spread westwards, via Alaska, through Asia and, finally, Europe. Thus we may see ( G.C Simpson, Horses, New York 1951) that Equus sthenonis, Europe’s most ancient horse, descends from the American Pleshippus. And, as is pointed out by Antonio Balnco Frefeiro in his study of “The hose in universal art” (1955), when the Spaniards took the horse to America they were simply returning it to its original homeland, where it had completely disappeared during the tragic glaciations of the Pleistocene epoch.