95 Fun Facts About Horse

How long is one hand, the unit used to give a horse's height?

Four inches is the standardised width of a human hand, which is how the unit began; the tape stops at the withers, where the neck meets the back, not at the top of the head.

Under most competition rules, what is an equine measuring no more than 14.2 hands at the withers called?

Pony means 14.2 hands or under, whatever the animal's age. Polo 'ponies' break the rule: most are full-sized horses, named from the days when the game capped its mounts at that height.

Roughly how long does a mare carry a foal before giving birth?

Eleven months, about 340 days, is long enough for a foal to arrive well developed: it is up on its feet and following its mother shortly after birth.

What is the term for a young female horse, normally one under four years of age?

Filly is the word for a young female, colt for a young male; when the two meet on the track, as in the Kentucky Derby, the fillies are set to carry a few pounds less.

Which of a horse's four natural gaits is a three-beat gait?

Canter is short for 'Canterbury gallop', the easy pace at which pilgrims rode to Canterbury; its three beats sit between the two-beat trot and the four-beat gallop.

Checking a gift horse's mouth, as the proverb warns against, would reveal what about the animal?

Its age: a horse's teeth erupt and wear in a known pattern, so buyers read the mouth to judge how old it is. Doing that to a present was the rudeness the proverb warns against.

Which endangered wild horse, once extinct in the wild, has 66 chromosomes to the domestic horse's 64?

Przewalski's horse was last seen wild in the 1960s, and herds bred from zoo animals have been returned to Mongolia since the 1990s. Despite the extra pair, it can still have fertile foals with domestic horses.

Heavy horses traditionally delivered beer for breweries by pulling vehicles of which kind?

Drays are low, strong carts without fixed sides, made for heavy loads such as beer barrels; the word goes back to the Old English for 'to draw'.

The Lipizzan horse is most closely associated with which institution?

The Spanish Riding School of Vienna has schooled its Lipizzans in classical dressage for centuries. Its famous white stallions are born dark and lighten with age.

Eventing puts one horse and rider through dressage, show jumping and which third phase?

Cross-country, ridden over solid obstacles, is the phase that shows eventing's roots: the sport began as a test for cavalry horses and their riders.

Bucephalus was the celebrated warhorse of which commander?

Alexander the Great won the horse as a boy, in Plutarch's telling, by turning the unridable Bucephalus toward the sun so that he could no longer see the shadow that frightened him.

What does the name Bucephalus literally mean?

Ox-headed: the Greek joins bous, 'ox', and kephale, 'head', possibly because the horse bore a brand mark shaped like an ox's head.

Bucephala, the city named for the warhorse Bucephalus, was founded where he died in which modern country?

Pakistan: his master founded two cities on the Hydaspes after the battle there, one named Nicaea for the victory and this one for the horse that died beside it.

The Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk were the three founding sires of which breed?

Thoroughbred: all three stallions were imported to England and bred to local mares, and every modern Thoroughbred can trace its pedigree back to them.

Which bone of the human skeleton is missing altogether in the horse?

Collarbone: a horse has none, so its forelegs are not joined to the spine by bone at all but are held in place by muscles and tendons.

How many mounted players make up each team in outdoor polo?

Outdoor polo is four a side. Riders swap mounts between periods because one horse cannot last a whole match.

What is each period of play in a polo match called?

Chukka comes from a Hindi word for a circle or turn, a trace of the game's route to Britain through India; an outdoor match runs to between four and eight of them.

At which racetrack is the Kentucky Derby run?

Churchill Downs is named for John and Henry Churchill, who leased 80 acres to their nephew Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. for the track that staged the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.

The Kentucky Derby winner is draped in a blanket of which flower?

Roses give the Derby its best-known nickname, 'The Run for the Roses', taken from the blanket of blooms draped over the winner.

In 1973, Secretariat won which race by a record 31 lengths?

Belmont Stakes: the win completed his Triple Crown, and bettors holding 5,617 winning tickets never cashed them, presumably keeping them as souvenirs of the day.

A post-mortem on Secretariat found which organ to be more than twice the normal size?

Heart: the vet who examined him in 1989 never put it on a scale, but called it perfect, 'just this huge engine', and he later estimated it at about 22 pounds.

Which English racecourse stages the Grand National?

Aintree's first National, in 1839, went to a horse aptly named Lottery, and the runners had to clear a stone wall and cross a stretch of ploughed land on the way round.

Which horse is the only three-time winner of the Grand National?

Red Rum won in 1973, 1974 and 1977 despite a bone disease in his feet: trainer Ginger McCain galloped him on Southport beach, and the seawater is credited with keeping him sound.

The Grand National is what type of horse race?

Steeplechase: the name goes back to races over open country in which riders steered for a church steeple, and the National still asks its runners to take 30 fences.

Which Grand National fence is named for a captain unseated into its ditch in 1839?

Becher's Brook is where Captain Martin Becher was pitched off in 1839; he sheltered in the water below the fence until the rest of the field had jumped over him.

What is the average lifespan of a modern domestic horse?

25 to 30 years is typical, though a few horses reach their 40s. Racing keeps the count simple: every racehorse in the Northern Hemisphere officially turns a year older on 1 January.

Eyes on the sides of its head leave a horse with a blind spot where?

Directly behind its tail: side-set eyes let a grazing animal watch nearly the whole horizon for predators, at the price of a blind spot at the back and another just in front of the nose.

Which American breed was developed for short sprint races, in which it can outrun any other?

Quarter Horse: the breed was developed for races of about a quarter of a mile, which gave it its name, and over that distance it can outrun other breeds.

The Botai people of 5,500 years ago, whom some scientists credit with first taming horses, lived in which modern country?

Kazakhstan: Botai villages on its northern steppe are thick with horse bones, yet DNA has shown their horses were not the ancestors of today's domestic breeds.

What are the four canine-type teeth found behind the incisors of stallions and geldings called?

Tushes are a male trademark: stallions and geldings normally grow all four, while in most mares they are missing or barely break the gum.

Sampson, the tallest horse ever recorded, belonged to which heavy breed?

Shire: Sampson, foaled in Bedfordshire in the 1840s, grew to more than 21 hands, over seven feet at the withers, and was later renamed Mammoth.

Australian racing legend Phar Lap was actually foaled in which country?

New Zealand: Phar Lap was foaled on a stud farm near Timaru in 1926 and sold across the Tasman as a yearling. The two countries still share him: his hide is in Melbourne, his skeleton in Wellington.

Which Triple Crown winner did Seabiscuit beat in their famous 1938 match race at Pimlico?

War Admiral, a son of Man o' War, was expected to lead from the start; instead Seabiscuit, Man o' War's grandson, broke in front and beat his own uncle by four lengths.

Which colt retired in 2012 unbeaten in all 14 of his races and rated the best racehorse in the world?

Frankel won all 14 for Sir Henry Cecil, who trained him while fighting cancer and said after the last of them: 'He's the best I've ever had, the best I've ever seen.'

Which Tuscan city stages the Palio, a bareback horse race around its main square, twice each summer?

Siena: ten of the city's 17 districts, the contrade, race each time, and both dates honour the Virgin Mary: 2 July for the Madonna of Provenzano and 16 August for the Assumption.

Marengo, the warhorse captured at Waterloo, had carried which leader?

Marengo was Napoleon Bonaparte's small grey Arab, named for his victory of 1800. Captured on the field at Waterloo, he was taken to England, where his skeleton is now in the National Army Museum.

A gelding named Bamboo Harvester played the title role in which American TV series of the 1960s?

Mister Ed: a nylon thread in the mouth got the horse 'talking' at first, but co-star Alan Young recalled that he soon learned to move his lips on cue.

Roy Rogers' famous movie horse Trigger had a coat of which colour?

Palomino: the golden stallion was registered as Golden Cloud until Roy Rogers, choosing a mount from the horses the studio stables sent over, picked him and renamed him Trigger.

Comanche, a cavalry horse famed as his detachment's lone survivor, was found wounded after which battle?

Little Bighorn: Comanche had carried Captain Myles Keogh, who died with Custer. Nursed back to health, the horse was retired under an order that nobody was ever to ride him again.

Man o' War lost just once in 21 starts, to an aptly named colt called what?

Upset won by a neck in the 1919 Sanford Memorial at Saratoga after Man o' War, fractious at the barrier, got away badly; whenever they met again, Man o' War won.

The Akhal-Teke, nicknamed the 'Golden Horse' for its metallic sheen, comes from which country?

Turkmenistan puts the Akhal-Teke on its national emblem; in 1935 Turkmen riders took the horses from Ashgabat to Moscow in 84 days, three of them spent crossing the Karakum desert.

The Falabella, one of the world's smallest horse breeds, was developed in which country?

Argentina: bred south of Buenos Aires from small local horses, the Falabella stands no more than 34 inches tall, yet it is counted as a true horse in miniature.

The Pony Express mail service, launched in 1860, lasted roughly how long?

The Pony Express ran only about eighteen months, from April 1860 to October 1861; it cut cross-country message times to about ten days but folded days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed.

Which Roman emperor, according to legend, planned to make his horse Incitatus a consul?

Caligula, by Suetonius's account, gave Incitatus a marble stall, an ivory manger, a house and slaves, and was said to be planning a consulship for him; no ancient writer claims it happened.

Which horse in 2015 became the first winner of the US Triple Crown for 37 years?

American Pharoah swept the three races in 2015, was then beaten in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga, and bowed out by winning the Breeders' Cup Classic.

Suffragette Emily Davison was fatally injured at the 1913 Epsom Derby by a horse belonging to whom?

King George V owned Anmer, the colt that struck her. Her purpose is still unclear: a 2013 film analysis suggested she was reaching up to fix a suffragette scarf to its bridle.

What is the triangular, elastic structure on the underside of a horse's hoof, sitting between the heels, called?

The frog is a rubbery wedge between the heels that cushions each stride; pressed against the ground, it also helps pump blood back up the leg.

Eclipse, the undefeated 18th-century champion, gave us 'Eclipse first, the rest' what?

Nowhere: the line is credited to the gambler Dennis O'Kelly, said to have called the result before a race that Eclipse then won out of sight; the horse retired unbeaten after 18 races.

Which Derby winner was kidnapped from an Irish stud farm in 1983 and never seen again?

Shergar had won the 1981 Derby by ten lengths, a record. Armed men took him from Ballymany Stud two years later; a ransom was demanded but never paid, and no trace of him was found.

Which Australian race, run on the first Tuesday in November, is known as 'the race that stops the nation'?

Melbourne Cup: first run at Flemington in 1861 and won by a horse called Archer, it has grown into something close to a national day, with a public holiday in its home city.

Which horse carried the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo?

Copenhagen was named for a British victory in the Danish capital, raced without much distinction, and was sold to Wellington in Spain; after Waterloo he lived out his days on the Duke's estate.

Traveller, a grey American Saddlebred, was the famous mount of which Civil War general?

Robert E. Lee bought the grey in 1862 and rode him through the war. Traveller outlived the general by only a few months and now lies beside the chapel that holds Lee's tomb.

Black Beauty, the 1877 'autobiography of a horse', was written by whom?

Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty while bedridden in the last years of her life, and died five months after it came out, just long enough to see her only novel succeed.

Justify, the 2018 Kentucky Derby winner, broke the 'Curse of Apollo' because he had never done what?

Raced as a two-year-old: no Derby winner since Apollo in 1882 had skipped the juvenile season. Justify, who made his debut only that February, went on to sweep the Triple Crown.

Which mare became the first female winner of the Breeders' Cup Classic and lost only the last of her 20 races?

Zenyatta liked to drop to the back of the field and swoop late. It won her the 2009 Classic, but a year later the same charge fell just short of a colt named Blame.

Which Australian mare retired in 2019 having won her last 33 races in a row?

Winx began the streak in May 2015 and nearly lost it in the 2017 Warwick Stakes: left lengths behind at the start, she caught the leader right on the line.

Which unbeaten female champion was fatally injured in a 1975 match race against that year's Kentucky Derby winner?

Ruffian had won all ten of her races. After the breakdown she was buried in the infield of the track where she ran her last, her nose pointed toward the finish line.

Kincsem, unbeaten in all 54 of her races in the 1870s, came from which country?

Hungary bred Kincsem, whose name means 'my treasure'. She raced all over Europe by train, and legend has it she would not board without her stable cat.

Misty of Chincoteague, the 1947 children's classic, is set on an island in which US state?

Virginia: the story follows the real Beebe family of Chincoteague, where each July the wild herd is swum across the channel from Assateague and most of the foals are auctioned.

The spotted Appaloosa breed was developed by which Native American people?

Nez Perce breeders developed the spotted horses, lost most of them after the war of 1877, and the breed faded until a club formed in 1938 set about reviving it.

The all-black Friesian horse originates in a northern province of which country?

Netherlands: the black horses of Friesland were once ridden to war, and their looks have made them favourites of film-makers, from Ladyhawke to The Mask of Zorro.

Under Icelandic law, what happens to an Icelandic horse once it has been exported?

It may never return: Iceland lets no horses in, not even its own coming home, because the island's isolated herd has been spared most equine diseases and has little immunity to them.

Haflinger horses from the Tyrol, with their flaxen manes, are always which coat colour?

Haflingers are always chestnut, from pale gold to dark liver, with a white or flaxen mane and tail; the breed is named for the village of Hafling in South Tyrol.

The Morgan horse, one of America's first breeds, is the official state animal of which New England state?

Vermont: every Morgan traces to a single stallion called Figure, who came to be known by the name of his owner there, Justin Morgan, and passed that name to the breed.

A free-roaming feral horse in Australia is known by what name?

Brumby herds descend from settlers' horses that escaped or were lost, and the best known of them roam the high country of the Australian Alps.

A set of tendons and ligaments called the stay apparatus lets a horse do what?

Sleep standing up: the legs lock so a dozing horse stays upright with almost no muscular effort, but it still has to lie down flat for its deepest sleep.

In dressage, what is the name for a highly collected trot performed almost on the spot?

Piaffe comes from the French piaffer, said of a horse striking the ground with its forefeet without advancing; in the arena the horse keeps the trot's rhythm while hardly moving forward.

The 1956 Melbourne Olympics held their equestrian events in which city instead?

Stockholm staged the 1956 equestrian events in June, five months before the Melbourne Games opened, because Australia would not relax its long quarantine on imported horses.

Ascot Racecourse was founded in 1711 by which British monarch?

Queen Anne, out riding from Windsor Castle in 1711, came upon a stretch of open heath she thought ideal for horses to gallop at full stretch, and had a racecourse laid out on it.

The painted wooden Dala horse is a national symbol of which country?

Sweden's carved horse from Dalarna was a children's toy until it was chosen as the symbol of the Swedish pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which made it a national emblem.

Clever Hans, the German horse who seemed to do arithmetic, was really responding to what?

His trainer's reactions gave the game away: Oskar Pfungst showed in 1907 that Hans was reading involuntary shifts in body language, and the 'Clever Hans effect' still warns experimenters against cueing their subjects.

The prehistoric Uffington White Horse was made by cutting trenches into an English hillside and packing them with what?

Crushed chalk: left alone the figure would grass over, so local people long held a festival to scour it clean, and National Trust volunteers still turn out to re-chalk it.

Northern Dancer in 1964 became the first Kentucky Derby winner bred in which country?

Canada: nobody would buy the colt when his breeder, E. P. Taylor, offered him for sale as a yearling, so Taylor raced him himself, and Northern Dancer won him the Derby.

Nijinsky in 1970 was the 20th century's last winner of which racing series?

English Triple Crown: Nijinsky took the 2000 Guineas, Derby and St Leger in 1970, then lost his unbeaten record weeks later, beaten a head in the Arc.

A bay horse has black 'points' on its mane, tail and legs and a body of which colour?

Reddish-brown: a bay carries the pigment for a black coat, but a gene called agouti confines the black to the mane, tail and lower legs and leaves the body red-brown.

Pimlico Race Course, traditional home of the Preakness Stakes, is in which city?

Baltimore: the Preakness winner's blanket of black-eyed Susans is one in name only, since the flower blooms too late for the May race and Viking poms stand in for it.

The Belmont Stakes, 'The Test of the Champion', is also nicknamed the Run for the what?

The Belmont winner is draped in white carnations, hence 'Run for the Carnations'; run over a mile and a half, it is the oldest of the three Triple Crown races, dating from 1867.

In British usage, a pinto pattern on a black base coat is called what?

Piebald joins 'pie', the old name for the magpie, to 'bald' in its early sense of streaked with white; skewbald is the British word for white patches on any colour but black.

The capriole, a leap in which a horse kicks out behind in mid-air, takes its name from which animal?

Goat: capriole comes through the Italian capriolo, a roebuck or wild goat, from the Latin caper, a he-goat, and probably gave English its 'caper', a playful leap.

In Norse myth, which god gave birth to Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir?

Loki turned himself into a mare to lure away the stallion Svadilfari, whose giant master was about to finish the gods' wall on time and claim his price; the foal that followed was Sleipnir.

In Greek myth, the winged horse Pegasus sprang from the severed neck of which monster?

Medusa: Pegasus sprang from her blood when the hero Perseus cut off her head. He was later tamed by Bellerophon, who rode him into battle against the Chimera.

Which Greek hero is traditionally credited with devising the Trojan Horse?

Odysseus is credited with the ruse, yet the story is not in the Iliad, which ends before Troy falls; it is told briefly in the Odyssey and at length in Virgil's Aeneid.

Lady Godiva's legendary naked ride was through the streets of which English city?

Coventry: in the legend Godiva rode to make her husband Leofric, Earl of Mercia, lift his taxes on the town; 'Peeping Tom' was added to the story centuries later.

The Charge of the Light Brigade took place at which Crimean War battle in 1854?

Balaclava: a vague order sent Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade charging at well-prepared Russian guns on 25 October 1854, and Tennyson's poem about the disaster was in print within weeks.

In Michael Morpurgo's novel War Horse, what is the name of the horse bought by the army?

Joey is the farm horse sold to the army in 1914 and followed through the war by Albert; published in 1982, the novel became a stage hit in 2007 with Handspring's life-size puppets.

What let 100/1 outsider Foinavon win the 1967 Grand National?

A pile-up at the 23rd fence stopped nearly the whole field. Foinavon, too far behind to be caught in it, found a gap and jumped clear, and in 1984 the fence was named after him.

Which future novelist was aboard Devon Loch when he collapsed in the 1956 Grand National?

Dick Francis, later a best-selling thriller writer, was the jockey; the horse belonged to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the sudden collapse on the run-in was never explained.

Which jockey, nicknamed 'The Long Fellow', won the Epsom Derby a record nine times?

Lester Piggott won his first Derby at eighteen in 1954 and his ninth in 1983. The nickname came from his height: he was tall for a Flat jockey and fought his weight throughout his career.

Which jockey rode all seven winners on a single afternoon at Ascot in 1996?

Frankie Dettori's seven winners multiplied to odds of 25,095-1, and bookmakers are reckoned to have lost about 40 million pounds to punters who had backed him through the card.

How many seconds must a rodeo bronc rider stay aboard for the ride to count?

8 seconds is the target, and the whole ride is one-handed: a rider who touches the horse with the free hand before the buzzer scores nothing.

Which horse was the first in history to earn US$1 million in prize money?

Citation swept the 1948 Triple Crown, then was kept in training after an injury to chase the million. Beaten four times by Noor in 1950, he finally passed it in his last race in 1951.

Which engineer adopted 'horsepower' to compare steam engines with draught horses?

James Watt took up the term in the late 18th century to compare his steam engines with the draught horses they replaced; fittingly, one horsepower is now about 745.7 watts, the unit named after him.

Which unit, an eighth of a mile long, is used to give the distances of horse races?

Furlong is Old English for 'furrow long': the length of a ploughed furrow, as far as a team of oxen could pull without a rest, later fixed at 220 yards.

The Marwari horse of Rajasthan is instantly recognised by which feature?

Inward-curving ears, with tips that can meet, are the mark of the Marwari, bred over centuries as a warhorse by the Rathore rulers of Marwar.

The Horse Whisperer (1998) was directed by and starred which actor?

Robert Redford had never before starred in a film he directed. Buck Brannaman, the real horseman who inspired his character, advised on set and doubled for him in the saddle.