LIFE: Horses

The horse is the most important animal in human development, fertilizing and ploughing fields, taking the crops to market, transporting humankind around cities, across continents and conscripted into war, conquering the world. The horse has given so much to us, often much more than we’ve deserved, yoked to Roman chariots and stagecoaches, as a mount for cowboys and Native Americans in the Old West. The Coach & Horses pub in Dickens’ Oliver Twist reminds us that the horse was for centuries the primary mode of human transportation, the first means of getting from A to B that was faster than human locomotion. Horses are some of our most enduring film and TV stars–Black Beauty, Trigger, National Velvet, Seabiscuit, and so on.