Antiques & Collecting

The Horse: an elaborate traveling museum exhibition

By EMILY SACHAR

The will, power, calm, nobility, and critical role of the equine are celebrated and examined in The Horse, an exhibition now making a multi-country, multi-city museum tour.

The comprehensive exhibit features dioramas, bones, war weapons, votive figures, cave paintings, video displays, and computer simulations that tell the story of this magnificent animal — and the impact of the horse on the life of man.

"What no one could have foreseen," says curator Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History, "was that over the millennia, while we molded the horse to our ends, the horse also molded us by changing the scale and scope of what could be carried, traded, fought over, or used to make life better — in short, civilization as we know it."

As the exhibit details, the horse evolved 55 million years ago, moving from a three-toed, short-toothed creature to one with hoofs and longer teeth. Think Nebraska 10 million years ago as you peer into a diorama and ponder the one-toed Dinohippus and two three-toed species, Nannippus and Hypohippus, as they stand in the fields.

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• Exhibit info
• Amazing horse facts

Look closely at the zebra-like stripes on the hind legs of Dinohippus and the spotted fur of Hypohippus and imagine the gentle grass-eating life of these creatures.

It wasn't long in the span of history before humans and horses interacted. Although scientists do not know for certain, they theorize that long before humans rode horses or used them as beasts of burden, they hunted them for food. As proof, researchers point to paintings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave, and others like it, in southern France that date back as far as 33,000 years.

They have also studied the Roche de Solutré, an intriguing rock formation in central France where thousands of horse bones, prehistoric spear points, and butchering tools have been excavated.

Graphic illustrations of this area from the late 19th century depict horses being driven to their death over the Solutré precipice, but recent studies suggest that the formation was more likely used to trap the horses in a natural corral.

In fact, about 10,000 years ago in North and South America, the genus Equus — which includes all species of horses, donkeys, and zebras alive today — became extinct, perhaps due to disease, a change in environment, or overhunting by humans.

Fortunately modern horses had long before reached Eurasia and Africa, where they survived to stage a comeback.

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The horse's extraordinary qualities fire the imagination, says MacPhee, and are often surprising to those who don't have regular interaction with horses.

"Their bodies are powerful, living machines that can work all day powered only by grass, while they have both the ability to comprehend subtle commands and the motivation to obey them."

With such adaptive traits, horses have been used in war by samurais in Japan, by the Spanish as they invaded South America in the 1500s, by Greeks for horse-drawn chariots around 1500 B.C., by Amazon warriors, and by European knights of the Middle Ages.

But even the horses bred for jousting and war during King Henry VIII's reign in England could be overcome by the sheer weight of a knight in shining armor. Determined to enhance the size of British horses, Henry VIII decreed in the early 1500s that major landowners had to keep at least two large mares, and in 1541 he banned stallions from grazing on public lands unless they met certain height requirements.

Demonstrating the disparity of the horse's size, two skeletons on display in the exhibition range from that of a 2,370-pound draft horse bred for strength to that of a 170-pound Shetland "pit" pony bred to work underground in coal mines in the 1800s.

Horses bred for speed enabled the Pony Express (created in 1860 and lasting only one-and-a-half years) to reduce the time to carry a letter across the United States from 25 days by carriage to 10 by horseback. The fastest Pony Express ride was seven days, 17 hours and carried Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address to Sacramento, California.

Long serving as symbols of power, nobility, and wealth, horses have even been considered by some cultures to be gods and used in sacred rituals. In a village in southern India, for instance, village potters create 16-foot-tall terra-cotta offerings that look like horses.

Meanwhile, a wealthy Crow Indian woman's ceremonial horse gear includes a colorful saddle, blanket, stirrups, and bridle ornaments. And the Sakha people of Siberia milk their horses and ferment the liquid to make koumiss, a drink that is rich in vitamins and mildly alcoholic, which is used to celebrate the summer solstice.

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Some quick biology: Horses have 10 different muscles in their ears, compared with three extrinsic ones for humans, and each ear can turn almost 180 degrees. Horses can see all-around except directly behind them. And brushing the neck and back of a horse can lower the animal's heart rate by 11 to 14 percent, a clear sign of relaxation.

• Slideshow: Images from Equus photo book by Tim Flach

Wonder what goes on inside a horse before it evacuates? The Horse exhibit will show you, with a life-size computer simulation, manure plop by manure plop.

Diet? One Clydesdale — a breed developed in Scotland and best known in the United States as the trotting emblems of the Busch beer dynasty — can eat up to 23 kilograms of hay and 4.5 kilograms of grain per day. And horses, unlike cows and camels, can digest food while grazing or walking.

All of these facts and history make for a fascinating exhibit.

"Initially, when we discussed creating this show, I thought, Big history, interesting animal, but how can we tell its story in a compelling way? But I became immersed — passionate — about horses even though I don't ride and am not a 'horse person,'" MacPhee says. "I hope visitors to the show, like me, will find something new to appreciate even if they've known horses since they could walk. We made horses, and horses made us — it's a compelling tale."

Seeing the horse

The Horse exhibit features huge video projections, computer simulations, and nearly a dozen interactive displays (visitors can even measure their strength in horsepower).

It includes several especially dazzling components: On entering the show, visitors hear a surround-sound audio of thundering hoof beats and the whinnying and snorting of a herd of galloping horses.

Meanwhile, on a massive screen, they watch the horses gallop in super-slow-motion: The video was shot at 1,000 frames per second.

Also on view is a diorama of North America's Great Plains 10 million years ago. The American Museum of Natural History created the animal models used in the scene, which curator Ross MacPhee says "takes perfectionism to the point of obsession" in its painterly details. Then the museum used best evidence to create the fur to cover the skeletons for presentation to the public.

Visitors can touch casts of horse teeth and feet and look inside a horse as it digests food on a life-sized interactive video screen.

They can also examine different horse gaits by looking through a zoetrope, a precursor to the modern movie projector. And they can view a video of the rehabilitative work performed by an organization called Gallop that helps people with a variety of ailments, including multiple sclerosis, to improve their mobility — even to sit up and perform tasks they can't do in day-to-day life — through horse-riding therapy.

Organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Horse will travel to each of the institutions with whom the museum collaborated, and possibly to several others.

Amazing facts about horses

The tallest? Shortest? Fastest?

• The average lifespan of a miniature horse, typically defined as an animal up to 34 inches at the last hair of the main (between its shoulder blades), is from 25 to 30 years. Miniature horses are frequently kept as pets and can also be trained to lead the blind.
• A horse can rest and even doze while standing by locking one of its hind legs at the stifle joint (the knee). A group of ligaments and tendons called the stay apparatus holds the leg in place with minimal muscle involvement. Horses will switch from leg to leg to prevent fatigue in the locked leg. In fact, it takes a horse more energy to lie down than to stay standing.
• The famous mustangs of the American West, like many other "wild" populations, are actually considered feral, descended from escaped domesticated horses. The only truly wild horses, the Przewalski, live in Mongolia. These horses were declared extinct in the wild in the late 1960s. But a group was reintroduced to the wild in 1992 and has now successfully reproduced.
• Rhinoceroses and tapirs are the horse's closet living relatives outside the horse family. The only surviving branch of that family is the genus Equus, which includes zebras, asses, and donkeys, as well as horses.
• During the Han Dynasty, from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D., the Chinese mounted an expedition to Fergana, in present-day Uzbekistan, to acquire superior horses. Fergana horses were famous for sweating blood — a mystery now thought to be caused by parasites under their skin.
• Though cavalry charges are now a thing of the past, there are still places where a horse is more useful than a truck. In 2002 for example, during the war in Afghanistan, some U.S. Special Forces rode horses in areas where the rugged terrain and lack of fuel made auto transport impractical.
• In 1900, around 130,000 horses worked in Manhattan — nearly 10 times the number of yellow cabs on the streets of New York City today. A typical city horse produced up to 45 pounds of manure and 2 gallons of urine per day.
• An average horse's head weighs 11.84 pounds, compared with somewhere between 10 to 11 pounds for a human being. The average weight of its heart is 10 pounds, compared with 9 ounces for the heart of an adult human female and 10.5 ounces for that of a man. Any kind of mark which appears on the forehead of a horse is called a star, irrespective of whether or not it resembles one.
• Old Billy is the oldest recorded horse in history; he lived to be 62 years old, dying in November 1822 in Woolstone, England. Tulle, an Icelandic Horse mare, died in 1954 at age 57; she was still working at age 45. And Badger, a grey Arab-Welsh cross, was born in Wales in 1953 and died in 2004 at age 51.
• Falabella of Argentina is the smallest horse breed. The tallest of the breed stands about 30 inches at the shoulder. The smallest pony in history was a stallion named Little Pumpkin; he stood 14 inches and weighed only 20 pounds.
• The largest horse ever recorded was a Shire gelding named Samson, bred by Thomas Cleaver of Toddington Mills, England. Foaled in 1846, this horse grew to 7 feet 2.5 inches. Samson is also recorded as the heaviest horse, weighing 3,360 pounds.
• The fastest speed for a horse was recorded in 1945 in Mexico City when a 4-year-old racehorse — in a quarter-mile race — ran 43.2 miles per hour.

Sources: American Museum of Natural History, New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, American Miniature Horse Association, The Circle R Ranch (Minnesota), Traveller's Rest Equine Elders Sanctuary.

Issue: July 2009