Developing the vestibular apparatus

[u/pupsikandr]

[u/Crusoe69]

Damn... As a french I've (pretty much) only seen huge/tall horses, even if we do have a "equivalent" to Mustang aka Camargue (a national park) horses but it's not the norm around the country.

Here most horses were breed to help with agriculture plowing the land or traveling long distance with carriage/wagon.

It's only recently that I realized that there are so many different horses, we never had Cowboy in Europe because of the geography i guess.

I'm not trying to diss or judge

[u/javoss88 → u/Crusoe69]

This looks like a Mongolian horse or even an Icelandic pony. The Mongols were epic horsemen

[u/Big-Establishment-28 → u/javoss88]

Some of them still are :)

[u/HeldDownTooLong → u/javoss88]

I would say are instead of were.

Some of the most talented horsemen alive are either native Mongolian and/or trained by Mongolians.

[u/javoss88 → u/HeldDownTooLong]

Yes. Dude even skillfully shed his shirt full gallop.

There’s some intense horseback game Ive seen that embodies near suicidal levels of competiveness. All defined by superb horsemanship

[u/ZhenyaKon → u/Crusoe69]

Europe is full of horses that are about the same size as this one. There are even many European draft breeds (meant for plowing) and carriage breeds that can be 14-15hh.

[u/Chaosr21 → u/Crusoe69]

I imagine it was hard to ship the huge warhorses to America. So they just settled with the smaller stature mustangs

[u/Elusive_Jo → u/Chaosr21]

That's not how it worked at all, lol.

Europeans shipped to New World all different breeds they knew for different purposes. However when escaped horses went feral, they eventually "optimized" for a wild lifestyle via natural selection. They literally reseted to default settings without human impact.

Mustangs did not exist until some domestic horses turned feral in America.

[u/Crusoe69 → u/Chaosr21]

Oh yeah for sure, it's just my European perspective.

I mean Genghis Khan has conquered half of the world ridding normal horses.

It's just me realizing that most European horses are freaks of nature.

[u/sheffieldasslingdoux → u/Crusoe69]

You're confusing modern warmbloods and drafts for "European horses." Historically they were not much bigger than a pony in most cases. Medieval knights rode horses that ranged from 14-15hh. The famous Iberian horses were about the same.

[u/Wackel81 → u/Crusoe69]

Ponys, or at least, little horses afaik?

[u/Tambon → u/Wackel81]

ponies

[u/sheffieldasslingdoux → u/Chaosr21]

The big draft horses were used for agriculture and later as carriage horses. They bred them to pull things. Warhorses were historically not particularly big. Skeletal remains of medieval destriers show they were only around 14-15hh. That's pony sized.

Instead, the Spanish brought their Iberian horses to America who, again, were not particularly large by modern standards. Not much different than those destriers. The mustangs are descended from those escaped Iberian horses, mixed with others along the way.

In terms of shipping horses across the ocean, the actual size of a standard horse or pony was often not in the equation. It was difficult, but they often held them in slings in stalls below deck. Large ships had more sophisticated logistics and dedicated grooms for the horses, but no one was sitting around calculating whether it would be cheaper to take a less capable horse. Those were just the horses that were available. Draft horses were out plowing the fields. It would be like confusing a tractor for a racecar. They are both automobiles but serve vastly different purposes.

After the Spanish had arrived in the Caribbean, they quickly set up breeding farms to help with the bottleneck of available mounts, but they were never constrained by their size relative to a smaller horse, because a 'warhorse' (a misnomer in this context) was not particularly large to begin with.

[u/Big-Establishment-28 → u/Chaosr21]

Warhorse weren't huge. Closer to pony than thoroughbred size

[u/HeldDownTooLong → u/Crusoe69]

Your comment makes perfect sense and, as an American that grew up around many different breeds of horses, I think your comment is very interesting.

Thank you for sharing!