Horse – each of us has different images associated with this word. For some it’s a pony in the park, for others it’s just a beautiful animal, for others it’s a friend. But I think everyone agrees with one fact: a horse is an amazing animal. Graceful, statuesque, beautiful, and at the same time, strong, hardy. Insanely friendly.
Man has known the horse for many centuries, and for these centuries have invented a lot of ways to use it, its training, to communicate with it. To this day, however, all the mysteries of the horse have not been solved.
The horse is beauty and grace.
The horse is strength and stature.
The horse is a slave. A slave to man.
In an attempt to curb and tame the horse, people sometimes go too far. And then the horse becomes a slave. Or turns into an uncontrollable animal. This outcome is not uncommon, but there are people who still treat the horse more as a friend than a worker. And only in such a situation can you get a lot out of a horse and even more.
This essay will talk about a type of human use of the horse for entertainment called equestrianism. This sport comes in many forms, beautiful, dangerous, and exciting.
The evolution of the horse
The eastern Slavs adopted the word “horse” from the Turkic horsemen, it sounded like “alosha” . Turkic tribes roamed in the southern Russian steppes and were in close contact with the Slavs of the Dnieper. The words “horse” , “mare” They are found in the languages of many Slavic peoples and their roots go back to the Indo-European proto-language.
Man has learned about the origin of the horse and its evolution by the bones. More than 60 million years ago, a primitive predecessor of the horse, the barylambda, appeared. It looked almost nothing like a horse. Thick, over two meters long, it moved slowly on short legs that ended in five toes with hoofed claws. It fed on shrubs and grasses.
Many reasons influenced the evolution of the horse. One of the main ones is the change in its living conditions. The horse’s distant ancestors lived in tropical forests with soft ground. Gradually, the shape of the planet and its climate became different. Where subtropical forests had once been, immense steppes spread out. To travel great distances in search of food, long limbs and hooves, capable of withstanding the recoil of hard ground, were needed.
The first horse-like ancestor to inhabit the forests of Europe, Chiracoterium (the closest relative of the North American Eohippus) appeared about 55 million years ago. It had four toes on each front limb and three on each hind limb and was about the size of a small dog. The skeletal remains of eurohippus bear little resemblance to those of today’s horses. Only the structure and arrangement of the teeth testify to their close kinship.
Three-toed horses first appeared 35 million years ago. It was only 15 million years ago that the first one-toed horse appeared, of which the hipparion is a famous example, and pliohippus was its further evolution. It already strongly resembled today’s horses, but was more miniature than them.
At different times, the descendants of eohippus passed from North America to Asia through the then-existing isthmus at the site of the present-day Bering Strait. Most species continued to die out and disappear from the face of the Earth, but Equus, which appeared in the Old World during the Pleistocene (about 1.5 million years ago) survived and became the ancestor of the modern horse.
Classification
Despite the diversity of ancestors, there are currently only seven species in the equine family. The most famous of these is the domestic horse. It is represented by a variety of breeds, sizes, and shapes. These horses are found in every corner of the world. The other six species are wild horses. They include: three species of African zebra (Burchell’s zebra, Grevy’s zebra and mountain zebra), two species of donkey (African and Asian) and the last species, the Przewalski’s horse, sometimes called the Mongolian wild horse (the nearest living relative of the domestic horse).
All members of the equine family are vegetarians and are adapted to high-speed running. They have long legs with a well-developed middle toe as a hoof, the neck is long, and the head is rather elongated. The lower and upper incisors bite down on plants, and the strong molars chew.