Fascinating Facts About Horses

Horses are one of the amazing creatures alive on the planet Earth. It has a magnetizing power that attracts huge mass towards it. From around 3000 years or more, people are domesticating horses and taking care of it too. never Even if you never learned to ride or drive one, you could spend your whole life studying them and still have plenty to explore. Here are some facts about horses…

1. Horses Sleep Standing up:

Yes, it’s true; horses do sleep standing up! They sleep laying down too, but only for short times. Learn all about the sleeping habits of horses.

Horses can’t burp, at least not the way humans do. They can’t vomit or breathe through their mouths like humans do either. A horse’s digestive system is a one-way process, unlike cattle and other ruminants who regurgitate food to re-chew it. Although they have a pretty efficient way of processing tough fibrous foods that make up their forage, this long, one-directional system can cause problems that result in colic.

3. A Horse’s Age Can be Estimated by Its Teeth:

You can’t make out exact figure of age, but you can have an estimated value of age by its teeth. Horses need proper equine dental care for their teeth, but sometimes a horse lives longer than its teeth do, so extra care is needed when feeding senior horses.

4. Horses Can Live to be Over 30 Years Old:

All have one suspicious question for horses and that is about its lifespan. The answer may surprise you. Our knowledge about horses or horse nutrition, horse care, and veterinary medicine has increased. Because of this, just as human life expectancy has increased, so has equine longevity.

5. The Resting Respiratory Rate of a Horse is About Four Breaths per Minute:

It is important to know the resting respiratory pulse and respiration rate of your horse. While the resting respiration rate of a horse can be as low as four breaths per minute, that can quickly increase with work or distress. Learn your horse’s resting pulse and respiration rate or TPRs.

6. The Original ‘Horse’ was The Size of a Golden Retriever:

The original horse was no larger than a Golden Retriever. Diminutive Hyracotherium may have looked more like a small goat or deer than a modern horse. Hyracotherium lived during the Eocene epoch about 50 million years ago.

• Horses can sleep both lying down and standing up.
• Horses can run shortly after birth.
• A 19th-century horse named ‘Old Billy’ is said to have lived 62 years.
• Horses have around 205 bones in their skeleton.
• Horses have been domesticated for over 5000 years.
• Horses are Herbivores(Plant eaters).
• Horses have bigger eyes than any other mammal that lives on land.
• Horses are capable of seeing nearly 360 degrees at a time because its eyes are on the side of their head.
• Horses gallop at approx 44kmph.
• The fastest recorded sprinting speed of a horse was 88kmph.
• Estimates suggest that there are around 60 million horses in the world.
• Scientists believe that horses have evolved over the past 50 million years from much smaller creatures.
• A male horse is called a stallion.
• A female horse is called a mare.
• A young male horse is called a colt.
• A young female horse is called a filly.
• Ponies are small horses.
• Ponies have thicker mane and tail than horses.
• They have proportionally shorter legs, thicker necks, and shorter heads.
• Well trained ponies are good for children while they are learning to ride.
• Young ponies are called foals.
• Shetland ponies are short but very strong.
• Pound for pound, ponies are stronger than horses.
• Miniature horses are even smaller than ponies.
• Ponies are easy to look after, requiring half the food that a horse would if it was the same weight.
• Horses can run within hours after birth.
• When horses look like they’re laughing, they’re actually engaging in a special nose-enhancing technique known as “flehmen”, to determine whether a smell is good or bad.
• A horse’s teeth take up a larger amount of space in their head than their brain.
• You can generally tell the difference between male and female horses by their number of teeth: males have 40 while females have 36.
• Horses will not lie down simultaneously because at least one will act as a look-out to alert its companions of potential dangers.
• Horses can not vomit.
• The average horse’s heart weighs approximately 9 or 10 pounds.
• Horses drink at least 25 gallons of water a day. They usually drink more in hotter climates.
• Horses produce approximately 10 gallons of saliva a day.
• Horse hooves are made from the same protein that comprises human hair and fingernails.
• On the underside of a horse’s hoof is a triangular shaped area called the ‘frog’, which acts as a shock absorber for a horse’s leg and also helps to pump blood back up the leg.
• It takes 9–12 months to re-grow an entire horse hoof.
• Horses experience REM (Rapid Eye Movement) during sleep, which means they mostly like dream.
• Horses have a strong band of muscles around their esophagus. This band is so strong that a horse’s stomach would burst before it would vomit.

Originally published at horsenaturee.blogspot.com.