The Nature of Horses: Their Evolution, Intelligence and Behaviour by Stephen Budiansky Weidenfeld & Nicolson 290pp, £20 in UKAlthough Stephen Budiansky is the proud owner of a palomino quarter horse gelding, and is a hunting enthusiast, he harbours no pretences about his skill and writes his handsome The Nature of Horses not as an equestrian, but as a science journalist. As such, his primary objective is to approach this most beloved of all beasts with emotional detachment and recent scientific evidence. "Coming to a clear understanding of the horse's true nature," he insists, "is not just a matter of calling upon science, but of shutting the door at least for a moment of quiet contemplation, on 6,000 years of accumulated legend, myth, and sentiment."
Budiansky's premise is that, since the first known domestication at Dereivka in the Ukraine some 6,000 years ago, the domesticated horse has suffered continuously as a result of man's confusions between the horse's willing nature and his inherent nature and between human culture and equine nature. In order to clarify these confusions, Budi ansky takes the stance of an evolutionary ecologist and investigates various aspects of the horse as we know it - its evolutionary development, psychology, way of seeing the world, and its biomechanics - through the consideration of environment and circumstances.
Beginning at the beginning, Budiansky illustrates why a highfibre, low protein diet could be responsible for the evolution of the prodigiously tall, unreasonably leggy, single-hoofed and elegant modern equus from the hyra cotherium, a squat, dog-sized, four-toed creature fifty-five million years ago. Then, as now, the horse is a large herbivore and a "sociable animal", instinctively given to understanding signals of dominance and submission. The similar social fabrics of the equid and the human, "built as they are upon attachments, subordination to authority, and trust", made the domestication of the horse possible, according to Budiansky. And, when deprived of a natural herd environment, horses will form bonds with people, even cats, and it is this highly evolved social behaviour which is the key to understanding why the horse does what it does.
Like people, many of the best equine competitors have an ineffable maniere which commands respect, even awe, yet psychological experiments have shown that the horse learns "about as quickly as tropical aquarium fish, guinea pigs, and octopuses". Their redeeming features are their highly-developed neocortex (the part of the brain which enables mammals to learn and correlate multiple sensory inputs), their excellent associative memories, and their acute perception which allows them to anticipate events (transitions to canter, for example, or days of competition). Responding equally well to positive and negative reinforcement, most horses are, in short, classically conditioned along the lines of Pavlov's dogs.
For experienced and dedicated equestrians, Budiansky's chapters regarding equine intelligence and sociability will come as no surprise. Nor, indeed, will Irish horse breeders be overly pleased at Budiansky's claim that they are as archaic in their practices and their understanding of genetics as dog breeders in 1950.
The more technical chapters having to do with equine sight, genetics, and mechanics of movement, while not perhaps as revolutionary as Budiansky might believe, are still very valuable. In the chapter on movement, Budiansky rightly gives full credit to Eadweard Muybridge and his late 19th-century stop-action photographs for revolutionising the study of equine locomotion. He goes on, though, to give lucid but detailed discussions on how evolution had made the horse's legs disproportionately long and light, on the horse's various gaits, and on the reasons why, barely faster than a greyhound or a fox, the horse copes with being "fast and big" with such incredible efficiency that he is able to achieve top speeds "greater than any other land animal of equal size".
While this may rank high amongst the 40,000-odd published books having to do with horses, Budiansky ultimately reneges on his declared determination to view the beast without sentiment. In addition to his frequent references to his own palomino and his continuous lament of horse's sufferings due to human confusions in domestication, his firm stance as an evolutionary ecologist necessarily leads him to the obtuse and unrealisable conclusion that horses, wild by nature, should (moral imperative) be returned to their home after 6,000 years of domestication and evolution within that domesticity. "To return the wild horse to its home," Budiansky concludes, "will be the truest sign that science has at last gained one small victory over the human nature and human ignorance that have not always served us, or the horse."
Ellen Beardsley is a writer and a critic