Episode 34 Horses - Americans Don't Eat Them Except When We Do

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Listen to "034 Horses - Americans Don't Eat Them Except When We Do" on Spreaker.

 Link to the Episode:

Episode 34 Horses - Americans Don't Eat Them Except When We Do

Some Horse Relatives:

The Dawn Horse - Eohippus

Charles R. Knight - 1908 early recreation painting

Tapir... and a baby tapir



Un-fairly Adorable!

The Rhinoceros 
(but a Hippopotamus is NOT a horse relative - it is sort of in between Pigs and Dolphins)

Very Old Depictions of Horses - 
Chauvet Caves ~37,000 to 28,000 years ago


Ivory Horse Carving ~ 30,000 years ago
Vogelherd Cave

Could these be from a paleolithic or neolithic age pocket of horses that evolved on their own lonely corner of the Iberian Peninsula horse?  The mustachioed Basque Garrano horse.
(Hybrids with modern "regular" horses tend to be non-viable so *shrug*)
From Farewell to the Horse

African Horses Relatives (that look more like horses than Rhinoceroses) 
Zebra - 1 of three species

Quagga - this 1870 photo of a London Zoo Animal
as the Quagga was being trophy hunted to extinction

PLOT TWIST!
Since 1987, a group in South Africa has been working to restore the Quagga.
It has the appearance - but the genetics are much closer to Zebras than the original species.
You can see the success - BUT!
As with the Aurochs - this looks like the other animal - but it is an approximate copy, not the original.

The Quagga Project - Elandsberg Nature Reserve

While these projects - like "bring back the Woolly Mammoth" are fascinating - if they don't pay attention to also recovering the environment - the plant, insect and underlying supporting biome to support these marquee species, I find the whole thing a Creepy Alien Zoo type project.

Also - Please No Dinosaurs!  Michael Crichton had a point way back in that book.  But at least Quaggas are tasty to the endemic predators.

Mongolian Takhi Horse, aka Przewalski's Horse ("shuh-val-ski's" - it's a Polish name)
Seems to match well with the "golden horses"
found in Berengia - along the route of the Siberia to Alaska land bridge

Cataphract - those steel scales are heavier than you think!

The cataphract seems to have been a Western/Central Asian idea that 
migrated to Western Europe
This model by John Tremelling - Remount Depot

An Arabian that had a fancy painting made of it - likely some nice couplets as well:
Eustachy Erazm Sanguszko (1768 - 1844)
in the uniform of the Polish National cavalry 

Related Media:

Raulff, Ulrich. Farewell to the Horse. NY: Liveright Publishing, 2015.

Forrest, Susanna. The Troubled History of Horsemeat. The Atlantic, June 8, 2017






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