Ideas - How horses shaped humankind, from inspiring pants to vaccines

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

From the Hollywood motion picture, to life-saving vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus, to a staple in our closet: pants, we have a lot to thank horses for in our everyday lives. "Prior to riding horses, no one wore pants," says historian Timothy Winegard. He argues that horses are intertwined in our own history to the point that we overlook their importance. His research explains how they shaped societies, economies and cultures. Without us, horses would be nowhere, and vice versa. It was a partnership — our brains and their braun — that truly changed the world. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 10, 2024.

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.cautors.com. I exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Someone somewhere, more than 5,500 years ago, was the first person to ride a horse. They were probably somewhere in the Eurasian steppe. Grasslands that stretched from Bulgaria to Mongolia. And chances are, it was a teenage boy.

It would have been probably a hunter, and the hunters in this case were male. And I'd like to envision it was some adolescent group of hunters that went out there, and this guy's mates were, hey, I dare you to get on the back of that horse. Some stupid teenager on a dare that decided to literally change the world. And changed the world they did. According to historian and author Timothy Weingard,

his new book is called The Horse, A Galloping History of Humanity. He argues the history of the horse is the history of humankind. I think what they did was both literally and figuratively elevate the potential of our own species. It really changes the trajectory of human history and what we were able to accomplish as a species.

Timothy Weingard is a historian and associate professor of history at Colorado Mesa University. His previous book, The Mosquito, followed the history of humanity's deadliest predator. His new book, The Horse, Tracks the Past and Future of Humanity's Other Half. Timothy Weingard joins me now from Colorado. Hello. Hello, thanks for having me. Your last book was about the mosquito, and we've all had experiences with those. But I wonder what kind of experiences you've had with horses.

So I'm from Canada originally. I'm from born in Hamilton and raised in Sarnia, Ontario. So yes, mosquitoes are a part of Canadian summer, and there are, you know, just part of what we are as Canadians. But horses, not as quite intimate relationship with horses than I had with mosquitoes, growing up on the shores of Lake Huron for sure. As a kid, obviously horses were present in my life, but they weren't part of my daily life to the point where when my parents would take me to the local petting zoo in Sarnia with the Orwellian nickname the Animal Farm, I would stare at the horses

and they were my favorite animals to look at and feed our sour backyard apples just because of the power and the regal power contained underneath that shiny coat. And I would ask myself, and I answered this in my own research and in my own writing with the book, is, you know, I wanted to be a hockey player. So my parents would be, you got to eat your protein to get big and strong muscles. And I'd look at these horses and they're huge and massive. And I'd say, well, these things only eat grass and they're jacked. So I don't quite understand this protein dynamic. You're talking about mom and dad.

So I did answer my own question through the evolution of the horse of why it is this kind of superpower animal. that it is with a very, very unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina in the animal kingdom, which made it our sidekick throughout our last 5,000 years of history. You're in the Grand Valley now in Colorado. That must be a good horse country out there. Yeah, there's the, technically there's no wild horses left on the planet, but the feral horse herds up here at the book cliffs, and they're readily, fairly easily accessible actually. So there are a big tourist attraction for people to come to Grand

Junction to see our wild horses. And it is, you know, the bigger center in a very rural area of Colorado, about 30 miles from the Utah border. So definitely in horse country. And the rodeo coach, the rodeo coach here at CMU and I are good friends. So what are we to make of such a dramatic leap from, you know, mosquitoes to horses? As a historian, what is it that you're in pursuit of. Well, I think we like to assign our history to our own human agency, and a lot of the time, given our own hubris, we overlook external factors in the shaping of our human journey and our human story. And we often like to assign, you know, the deeds and events in our histories, whether that's international history or national histories, histories to our great men and women. And that can be the

case sometimes, but we overlook external factors in shaping and, you know, and we're not. And, you're and influencing our historical trails. And certainly when I, you know, it's an interesting lens to look at history through external factors and the impact that in my last book, obviously mosquito-borne pathogens have had on human history. And in this case, there's no really other animal that has shaped and influenced and dictated the course of events like horses,

which are intertwined in our own history, to the point that we overlook their importance in history, because they've seemingly just always been there. Yeah. It's always been there to the point that you, there's a term that you use when you describe the relationship between humans and horses. It's what you call a centaurian pact.

Can you explain what is the centaurian pact? Well, I think when we look at domesticating the horse, which is actually a later domesticate to our barnyard collection, and simply because horses were extinct all over the world, save for a small pocket of the Eurasian step, I think what they did was both literally and figuratively elevate the potential of our own species, and we were able to circumvent our own evolutionary limitations as a species by creating this dyad with the horse, by combining our brains with its utilitarian horsepower.

And when this combination happens, as I said, roughly 5,500 years ago on the Pontic Caspian step, it really changes the trajectory of human history and what we were able to accomplish as a species. And looking back, it is an equine revolution that really hauls into place the foundational building blocks of modern civilization, whether that be transportation, traction, war, trade, human migration, human interaction in the exchange of language, D.N. technology and ideas as well as pathogens, it's a, it is a, it's a revolution that transforms our society, really unlike anything else we've experienced.

This pact, does it approach something like a symbiosis? Is that overstating things? I don't think so. And when we look at the steps of domestication, very, well, for any animal, for that matter, not just, just horses, but very few animals have the right pre-adaptive biological traits, whether that's physical traits or social and behavioral traits to be domesticated. Humans have tried to domesticate every animal because of our greed, curiosity, and just because antilogic. So there's very few animals that actually allow themselves to be domesticated because they don't get from us what they get in the wild per se. So it's almost like a barnyard-stock home syndrome when we domesticate animals is they are getting from us what

they innately need in the wild and we take from them. So it's kind of this symbiotic relationship, whether animals are getting housed, fed, and guaranteed sexual reproduction through domestication, and then we take from them whatever it is we want. Companionship, a hunting partner is the case of a dog or a multi-purpose Swiss Army knife animal in the case of the horse. So let's go back a little bit to some of the history that you mentioned briefly in your answer. And just can you map out where on earth the horse actually begins as a species and where it spreads shortly thereafter? So actually the horse begins.

The epicenter of equine evolution is pretty much where I'm sitting right now in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. This is the area that's the epicenter of equine evolution. So 60 million years ago, there's an animal bombing around this area, which looked very different from what it does today from an ecumen. ecological standpoint. It was more lush forest with shrubbery and berries and shoots than it's the kind of dry desert or grasslands that it is today, which plays a role in the evolution of equine species in modern day horses. So it's called a hierarchotherium or a dawn horse. It's roughly 10 pounds, I mean the size of a fox. And it bounds more like a deer and it has multiple toes,

three toes on the front, four toes on the back. And over 60 million years, this creature evolves and spreads out across the globe, either over the Bering Strait, or at one point there was a land bridge that connected Canada through Greenland to Scandinavia. So these species are actually going both ways, where they continue evolve and die off, while the mainline evolution takes place in North America and eventually gives rise to modern equis genus. and it crosses over into Eurasia where it evolves into both zebras and asses or donkeys.

And so currently there's seven species of equus on the planet, three zebras, three asses or donkeys, and just one species of horse. So any horse you see is the same species. The tiny, you know, tiny pocket-sized horses or the giant Goliath horses, there's only one species. of horse left, so seven species of equis currently surviving. So as I mentioned earlier, it goes extinct because of climate change across the planet, save for this small secluded pocket on the Eurasian step. And that's where it's arguably saved from extinction by domestication.

Could you describe what the state of horses were as a population before human domestication? they were on their way to, you know, a night in the museum in a glass case before humans intervened in a way and not for, they wouldn't have known at this point that horses were extinct, but they were familiar with hunting horses. And it's likely that, you know, a hunter, perhaps an adolescent teen on a dare, decided to approach a docile or wounded mare and became the first horse whisperer in a way. And with that first kind of comforting touch in bringing this mayor back to his what must have been dumbfounded clan members of tribal into European culture that is where domestication starts and like any other animal the horse was first

domesticated as a literal livestock of meat, milk and its secondary products made from its hide and hooves and teeth and bones and everything else just like the indigenous peoples of the plains who used they had 150 different purposes for all portions and pieces of the bison. So it was used in a very similar manner by the original domesticators known as them the Yamniac culture or proto-Indo-Europeans in this area of the Eurasian steppe. One would assume that, as you said, that there had to be a first person in history to jump on the back of a horse.

What do you imagine? How might it have unfolded? So obviously you're not going to approach an animal unless you have something. some kind of based knowledge of the behavior of that animal, the physical, you know, attributes of that animal, the social behavior of that animal, whether in a herd or individually. So most likely given where we know when it was domesticated and by whom in the larger context of Indo-European peoples domesticating the horse, it would have been probably a hunter, and the hunters in this case were male.

and I'd like to envision it was some adolescent group of hunters that went out there. And, you know, this guy's mates were, hey, I dare you to get on the back of that horse, like, in daring him. And again, because of our wonderful pubescent minds that seemingly don't think so well, we decided to jump on the back of this wounded or docile mare. And I joke that it's amazing that any of us survived into adulthood. given our, I know it's relative, but reckless behavior as teenagers. And so I like to envision it was some stupid teenager on a dare that decided to literally

change the world with his anti-logic of jumping on the back of a large, wild animal. How reckless an act would it have been, do you think? I mean, it depends. And obviously, when we look at domestication in any stage, there's blurred lines between, you can tame any animal. I mean, you can tame an individual tiger or like the Carthaginian general Hannibal with his elephants, shivering elephants crossing the Alps during the Punic Wars against the Romans. It doesn't mean we've domesticated elephants as a species. We have not. So taming an animal from birth, removing it from its collective or its parents, we can, we can tame, you know, Coco the

gorilla or Mike Tyson's tiger for that matter in the hangover movie. But it's very different to domesticate it entire species like we have done with a very select few a very select few i'd like to think we haven't even done it with our own species yet given some of our interesting behaviors um so so uh it would have been pretty reckless i mean you see rodeo performers on these stallions um it's they give them a pretty good ride and and so again it would have probably have been a mayor and not a stallion given that mares innately are more docile from a behavioral point of view and in a way it's unique with horses because when we look at them they don't have horns they don't have claws they don't have sharp teeth and the males do have canines but they're they're not sharp ripping teeth

like cats have like the cat you know feline or cat families have so they're made 100% for flight not fight and that in a way is why they are such a beneficial companion or form this forge this unbreakable dyad with human beings is because they're evolved for flight and not fight which again is that speed stamina size and strength which is so unique in the animal kingdom the words for horse in various ancient languages are all surprisingly similar what does that tell us about the history of the horse human relationship. So it really speaks to the first domestic, I liken this, if it's a bad analogy or not so be it,

but I was served in the military, and I liken it to if your side has F-35 joint strike fighters and leopard tanks for the Canadian listener or Abrams tanks for the US listener, and your enemy has no planes and horses. obviously that's a very one-sided battle that's going to take place so given the fact that these indo-European peoples were the first to domesticate horses they spread themselves there are a very militant and paternalistic culture that spreads themselves across eurasia very quickly on these first generations of domesticated horses and in the process what they do is they completely overrun eurasia from the Atlantic Ocean in Europe through the Indian subcontinent all the way to Western China in Xinjiang province and 48% of the population currently speaks their language. We are speaking their language right now in English because English is a direct derivative of

their original proto-Indo-European language. So right there at the initial, you know, initial onset of domestication, we see the power of the horse in shaping and changing the world with modern repercussions. And on top of that, every European male has the Y chromosome of these marauding horsemen. It was not a benign process. And so they cement their genetics and literally wipe out Neolithic Europe or old Europe, both genetically, linguistically and culturally, and replace it with their very militaristic, patriarchal society, their Indo-European language and their genetics.

we see the same thing in India. All the Indian languages, for the most part, are Indo-European languages, whether that's, you know, Pashto in Afghanistan is an Indo-European language. And they make their all the way to Western China and what is now Xinjiang province, which is the huge Western province of China. That's a cultural melting pot where the Uyghurs are right now. Right. There was Ticarian speaking Indo-Europeans who introduced the horse, wheels and bronze, amongst other things, to China. for that matter. So right away, the horse is revolutionizing and retooling and reshaping the world upon its domestication.

One major way the horse helped reshape the world, as Weingard said, is through war. From the chariot? The chariot is actually very short-lived from a military weaponry standpoint. It has a huge impact on specifically Egypt being taken over by non-easternism. Egyptian people called the Hixos, and it introduces Egypt to the world in a way. It actually uses the very weapons and techniques that it's occupied by to repel the invaders. To the cavalry of the Assyrian Empire. True cavalry makes the chariot obsolete.

The Assyrians really bring around true cavalry in the sense of what we think it as around 800 B.C.E. and then really the horse and rider from the Assyrians onward is the longest serving human weapon system other than our own two feet. To a horse-mounted, bow-wielding people called the Scythians. They introduce saddles, very rudimentary saddles, but still, by having a saddle, it gives you much more of a stable platform as on a horse

and to conduct warfare or to ride. And there's this adoption of this true nomadic equestrian culture and these groups of people largely shape early history, whether that's the original Indo-Europeans, the offshoot, their ancestors to Scythians, and then their ancestors, the Huns or the Shang Nu in China, and then obviously the Mongols under Jenghis Khan, they largely shape the ebb and flow of history across Eurasia.

So those are some of the people who waged war from the back of a horse. war after all seems to come naturally to people. War is less natural to a horse. It's something you have to train them for. Horses do not like to run towards other horses. Horses like to all run in the same direction, because that's the herd mentality. If they see a horse running this way,

they're going to turn around and run because they figure there's a tiger after that horse. Jennifer Landles is the head of Academy Cavala, School for Historical Mounted Combat in Langley, British Columbia. Using historical texts and illustrations, they recreate the techniques of ancient and medieval mounted warfare. Salute, en-garde, begin. Here she introduces two of her war horses, Flavi and Toad.

You can see Flavvy's face, as she encouraging. counters the other horses that she's got her ears back and she's kind of aggressive, which is not great in a friendly situation, but, you know, I wouldn't want to have another horse on my side than that if it were in actual war. Toad here, this little gray guy, is a really good mounted combat horse just because he's quick and small, and quite brave too. He's not really afraid of other horses. And he's also, he would have been a typical size probably for a Norman horse from the Norman conquest, they would have been about that size. Right now what they're doing is warming up by high-fiving.

That just gets the horses used to coming face to face with each other. They're also coming up behind and doing grabs from behind, which is a good way to get somebody off their horse is to come and grab them by the shoulder, pull them off the saddle. It's very easy to be unhorsed in battle. And once you're on horse, it's very hard to get your horse back if it's lost in the melee. So fighting on the ground is a very important part. All right, let's grab swords. I mean, we have a process where we show them the sword first.

We swing it past their head. And when we get on horseback, we always, whenever we pick up our sword, we always sack them out with it, which means just swing it past each side of their head, give them a scratch between the ears with it, scratch all around their body with it, just reminding them that the sword is not there. enemy. And most horses that I've worked with are utterly fine with it. My main horse for years who's retired now but is an off-the-track thoroughbred and people think, oh, thoroughbreds are flighty and not suitable. As soon as we get in the ring and pick up a sword, she falls

asleep. She's like, oh, this is boring. And then when she starts to spar, she gets a little more animated, but they get really chill about it. All right, are you ready? Salute. On guard. Begin. So we're just starting with some blows and parries just to warm up. The key thing about the parry when you're parry from your right shoulder across your body

is to lift with your parry so that you don't drag your sword or your opponent's sword into your horse's neck. Plank Chris. Point, Dave. When you're training cavalry, it's the horse-to-horse interaction. It's convincing a horse to run at another horse, or even when you're just sparring to face the other horse. We do pass face-to-face. They're much more happy going in the same direction.

So one of the things I've found is our national horse, the Canadian horse, is a superb war horse. They are super brave. they're always forward-motivated. So even when they spook, they tend to spook forward rather than sideways. And then you'll see this afternoon Flavvy, our veteran campaigner, who is 28 years old and doesn't do many lessons, but she's still going strong. She does take it into her head to attack other horses,

so you do have to keep an eye on her. That's Jennifer Landl's head of Academy Cavallo, School for Historic. historical mounted combat in Langley, British Columbia. You're listening to Ideas and to a conversation with Timothy Weingard, historian and author of the book The Horse, a galloping history of humanity. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM and US Public Radio, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world,

at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyhead. This program is brought to you in part by Specksavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important.

At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.com. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cai to learn more. Do you suffer from television optionitis? Are you paralyzed by too much choice? You're not alone. One in three people spend up to 30 minutes choosing what to watch. Try one of CBC's shows.

Like Dragon's Den, small achievable goals, and Murdoch mysteries. Side effects may include loss of boredom. Find all your favorite shows on CBC TV or stream anytime on CBC Gym. I'm speaking with Timothy Weingard, originally from Sarnia. He's now Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University. In The Horse, he traces thousands of years of history based on the so-called Centaurian packed, the idea that humanity would be nowhere without the horse and vice versa. It was an ancient win-win.

Horses were in rough shape as a species before domestication about 5,500 years ago. It was a partnership, our brains, and their brawn that truly changed the world through trade, expansion, and war. One of the groups of ancient conquerors Timothy mentioned was the Scythians. Roughly 2,700 years ago, they swept out from the Caucasian step on the back of a horse. The Scythians weren't just a powerful military force, but a cultural one. So the Scythians, and, you know, everybody who's already read the book, whether it's my parents, my wife is actually on this chapter right now, and they're all like, I love the Scythian.

chapter because no one really knows about these people. So they're an Indo-European peoples who come to the forefront with the fall of the Assyrian Empire and they're actually part of the destruction of Nineveh, which is really in the Old Testament you hear about the destruction of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians are extremely sadistic. So there's no love lost in sacking their empire and their capital cities. In the Syrians, the Scythians are part of this. Now they're a group of Indo-Europeans on the Eurasian steppe. They really spread their culture and influence again across Eurasia, whether that be smoking of recreational marijuana.

The Crimea is named after a cousin of theirs, and then some of their ancestors morph into who we know as Attila and his Huns. And also the Amazons of lore are actually a real group of Scythians who occupy a part of the step who are matriarchal, and they are led by queens, and they're a very female-based warrior society. Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Ackamended or Persian Empire, meets his fate at the hands of the Amazons, and Queen Tomeris, who cuts off his head and turns his skull into a gilded drinking cup. So they are a group of Scythians. They have quite the fearsome reputation, but they've been largely forgotten by history, which certainly doesn't get.

of them their due justice in the amazing artwork and gold work and metallurgy that they have. It really is astounding. While the Scythians did fight with swords and spears, they are most remembered for their mounted archers. In Langley, B.C., Jennifer Landals of Academy Cavallo has a horsebow of her own that she carries atop Flabby. It's basically the same style. of bow that Attila on Huns archers would have used. The horse bow is shorter distance. It's generally shot straight, with not much arc to it, and it's done at speed. So the really

good horse archers can carry like 15 arrows bristling out of their hands like a hedgehog, and they just knock and shoot, knock and shoot, and it's not accuracy, it's speed. So the side shot, is the most common one and you're drawing your arm is straight out from the horse, you're drawing to your chest, and then when you release, you're basically one arm on either side of the horse. I pulled string towards my chest and release. The front shot, you have to tip your bow a little bit to the side. You're not shooting over the horse's head, but you're shooting sort of maybe at a 45 degree angle from the horse's head. So you're tipping your bow a little bit to accommodate for the shape of the shoulder.

And you're drawing straight to your chest so you don't get, you don't get as big a draw on the front shot. So it's more difficult. And then the rear shot, you're twisting completely around. So your legs have to stay facing forward in your saddle. You don't want to make your horse turn. Again, you get more draw this way, draw to the chest. and you get more of a release.

The difficulty is not hitting the target. The difficulty is reloading on a cantering horse and shooting from a cantering horse. So on horseback, you often go up into two-point position, which means you're standing in your stirrups and your knees are taking the motion of the horse. You want to get the feel of the canter strides. The ideal time to shoot is when there's all four feet are off the ground.

We have what's called a moment of suspension. So when you think about a canter goes, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, it's that space after the last dumb. That's when you shoot, because that's when you're the most level. Your horse is at the high point, they're up in the air, and there's no interference from the feet on the ground. That said, I mean, you shoot when you can, too. So if you fast forward to the First World War, that would have been possibly the last time that we would have seen. horses used on a mass scale in modern warfare. And I remember in my time living in London

that there's actually a monument that is dedicated to the role of the horse in that war and how that contributed to the development of democracy. I wonder how much recognition there is in the West do you think of horses as a tool of war that brought the world that we live in today? Yeah, I think the animals in war memorial

are talking about at Hyde Park. It's very somber and it's engraved. They had no choice. And they didn't, whether that's pigeons or horses or dogs or any camels, I mean, elephants, all the animals that we've used in warfare. And we have to remember that horses were conscripted into our human warfare, whether the cause was noble or nefarious. They certainly didn't have a choice.

What's interesting, actually, to your point, is that the Germans used more horses in the second World War than they did in the First World War. Blitzkrieg is actually just another myth based on Hitler's big lie. The Nazi armors were fueled by Oates, not oil, and there were certainly more ponies than panzers in the Vermeck or the German military. In 1939, when they invade Poland, actually, only 15% of the German military is mechanized. I'm going to say that again.

Only 15% of the German army is mechanized in 1930. It's extraordinary. 85% is run on horsepower. And by 1944, that number is only 10% mechanized. So after D-Day in Normandy, when the Canadians and Americans and British are 100% mechanized, the German army is only 10% mechanized. And that's, it blows people, there's a chapter in the book about this and this blows

people's minds. It's actually the heavy reliance that the Germans have on horsemen. forces that helps save the world from Hitler's sadism and Nazi regime and, you know, gives us democracy, at least in the Western world. Now, the Soviets who essentially help win the war, if not win the war on the Eastern Front, don't get to enjoy that democracy. But it's actually startling. The propaganda that's put out before the war by Joseph Goebbels and his video, his movie

reels, his film reels about this Nazi mechanized juggernaut. These are actually used by allied propagandists in Canada and the United States. Even though they know it's not true, they use the same footage that Gerbil's released to scare us into action. So it's a double propaganda. It's, look at this big, bad German mechanized army, we need you to enlist, we need you to rivet more planes, we need you to build more tanks. So these are in all the movie reels, we still watch documentaries on the Second World War. we're still seeing Gerbil's original propaganda promoting this myth of a German mechanized juggernaut

when in fact is they were 15% mechanized at best during any time in the war. Wow. Back to the idea of how much the horse has contributed to the modern world that we have today. How well known do you think that is? I think it's fairly well known because when we see movies or Hollywood shows

or the Wild West shows or we always see people on horseback. to the point that we forget that what they are. I think we just, we look at horses without actually looking at horses. They're just kind of there and we don't see them. And I think that's kind of what the book tries to draw out too, is that yes, they're a living machine, but they are these animals who have always been there. They've been beside us.

They made our history alongside us. We rode them into history. They were the invisible hand. driving history for the last 5,500 years. We've only had the internal combustion engine for 100. And I think that's part of the book is to look at history through a different lens and appreciate just how impactful these magnificent animals were in shaping our modern world order. And that goes from everything.

Like, I bet people don't know when they get their detap vaccines. that the horse actually was made the original vaccines for both diphtheria and tetanus. The horse serum, horses produced the serum that were used for the original vaccines for these horrific diseases that killed hundreds of millions of people. Diphtheria was called the strangling angel of children. It basically, your child would develop a mucus membrane in their windpipe until it slowly suffocated. them to death and they died. And horses are the ones who gave the original vaccine to humanity to stop young children dying.

It was the leading cause of death in America and Canada prior to the vaccine amongst children under 14. So thank you horses. Thank you horses for us not having to watch our children slowly suffocate to death. And so for tetanus as well, lockjaw is the common term. The serum was made from horses for the original vaccine. during the First World War, this vaccine saved untold numbers of lives and has ever since. So there's just so many little things, pants.

We wear pants because of horses. Prior to riding horses, no one wore pants. They're not comfortable. Thank you horses. Absolutely. There's a direct correlation in history and archaeological evidence between horseback riding and the origin of the first pants. Because if you ride a horse in a toga, a kilt, or a sarong, you're going to realize pretty

quickly. These probably aren't the garments we need. So a horse gave rise to pants. The very first motion... It's extraordinary. Yes, the very first motion picture ever. The birth of Hollywood is because of horses in a bet to see whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while galloping by Stanford, who the founder of Stanford University. And so he got a person to take multiple pictures in a row using tripwires on a series of cameras

and he spun these pictures on a Zupraxoscope that he invented on a glass plate. And when he spun the pictures, you could see the horse running. And Leland Stanford won the bet. He spent $50,000 in order to prove this and won the $25,000 bet. That's the gambler's logic, of course, right there. So the Hollywood in motion picture was started by the horse. Our day-to-day lives and our day-to-day existence and our market, society was hauled into place and dictated by the horse.

So just finishing off here, at the start of this interview, we talked about how the horse began in North America near where you live before it died out. When did the horse return to North America? So the horse is brought back to the Americas on Columbus's second voyage. So his first voyage, there was no animals on board. He had three terrible ships and 91 men, and it was a bit of his first voyage. was actually a bit of a disaster, and he sailed back with two ships. But during his second voyage, which is massive, he brings all the barnyard animals to the

Americas and their zoonotic diseases. So the horse is reintroduced on the second voyage. It makes its way from Hispaniola to Cuba to Mexico with Cortez. And then from Mexico, it essentially breaks loose and it spreads north through the plains from Santa Fe. and then into southern Canada, the plains eventually with decree, in the Jibwa Nishinaabe peoples in the plains of Canada. And we see horse cultures transform indigenous peoples overnight, specifically the Blackfoot, and then the Lakota in the northern plains,

and the Comanche become the horse lords of the southern plains. And they help, I guess, seal their own fate, because of their own destruction of the bison along with Europeans. Could you speak to that? Just the role that horses played in the colonization of North America. So obviously there are a weapon system that the Spanish have and indigenous peoples don't. And the eyewitness accounts of one Spanish horsemen cutting down thousands of indigenous people in a very short period of time are quite horrific. and we see this with the Taino, we see this in Mexico,

and we see this in the southern United States as well. But what happens very quickly is indigenous people of the plains adopt horse culture. And actually, when we think about this and we think about the Colombian exchange and everything that Europeans brought that were so destructive to indigenous people, certainly Jared Diamond's trifecta of guns, germs, and steel. To that I add horses. We think about horses as being a beneficial or uplifting or may perhaps the only beneficial or uplifting element of the Colombian exchange for indigenous people. That is entirely not true. Horses, the adoption of horses in an equestrian culture, were just as destructive

because they enter the capitalist European system through the fur trade and the bison fur trade. They start slaughtering the bison on industrial levels. The Comanchee at the peak are killing 575,000 bison a year to supply the American fur trade. So eventually entering this Euro-American or Euro-Canadian capitalist model, you start to see a hierarchy of power develop. within these indigenous nations. And some of them, and because of these horse wars and these bison wars between traditional enemies or for capitalist profit, a lot of these plains nations are between 65 and 75% female.

And so what happens is if you have more horses, you can get more bison and you need more wives to process your bison to then get more horses to get more bison. So the indigenous men who have more horses have more wealth. Some of these men have 20, 30 wives. Now, their first three wives are their traditional wives who are treated with all the respect and duties of a citizenship and their indigenous nations. The next 17 wives would be basically used as slave labor.

They're dressed differently. They're not allowed to have possession to mark their inferior place in their society, and they're often controlled by violence. And they're simply used to process bison hides to attain more horses, to attain more bison hides for the capitalist Euro-American or Euro-Canadian fur trade. It helps American and Canadian administrations subjugate indigenous peoples by creating hierarchies and dividing conquer tactics on the part of the U.S. and Canadian government. Last couple of questions, Timothy. I just, you've described this relationship between humanity and horses as the most important animal coalition ever witnessed.

And I wonder what you think it says about human history or where we are in human history, that we've been able to all but abandon that coalition. So it's interesting how I frame this, you know, when I talk about it or I, people question me about what, you know, what the book is actually. about and if he can summarize it in a sentence and you often get this question in interviews from the media here's how i kind of describe this is think about everything else we have on our planet certainly from an animal animal point of view or anything else from that matter and imagine if we removed that from history what our modern world would look like would it look the same or would it look completely different so if we remove the dog from our historical journey the modern world order would look the same.

We might be a little bit lonelier and we might not be knitting sweaters for Steve-o or 25-pound cockapoo, but the modern world order would look relatively the same. The dog didn't change the flight path or trajectory of human history or turn it upside down. Now try to think about the world if we remove the horse from our ancestral trails. our modern world order would look nothing like it does today. And that speaks to this dyad or the punching power or pardon the pun, but the literal horsepower that this animal gave or bestowed upon humanity and our historical journey.

So at the peak of horse population was roughly around 1920, just as the internal combustion engine is kind of unseating the horse. There was about 150 million horses on the planet. Today there's about 58 million horses on the planet. It's the ninth most abundant mammal on the planet. So the fact that there's still 58 million horses on the planet is like, well, what do they do? Certainly they're used for recreation as pets, for sport, whether that's polo, as an ancient Persian sport, rodeos, equestrian.

So horse racing is obviously a huge and very lucrative business. And it's come under some fire lately, as many listeners might know, with the treatment of these horses and how they're trained and how they're raised and some of the medical stuff that's done. But we also still use horses in the military. They were used in Afghanistan. They were used in Kosovo by NATO coalition forces. We still use them in police forces, which is an interesting way to look at the horse

and view our relationship with it, is that horses are used by police forces in Toronto or anywhere big cities for crowd control. And you say, if you look at the statistics, it's amazing the difference between what police officers can do on foot or on bicycles compared to the success rates of police. officers on horseback in quelling crowd control and riot control and the reason for that that speaks directly to the heart of our relationship with horses in that people love humans love horses humans might be perfectly happy to hurt the human police officer but they don't want to hurt the horse and on the flip side people are also have a healthy respect and fear of horses because they're so

big and so powerful that they give them their rightful distance. But we are living in the first era where our lives are not completely entwined with those of horses. Right. What have we lost? I think if you ask the horses, we haven't lost anything. Because we have to remember that horses were treated not very humanely, whether they were urban horses used to pull omnibuses or carts or whether they were used for war.

they were conscripted into service not necessarily with their consent. So I think if you're the horse, you're thinking, I know, I like just being a recreational pet and you treat me well and you feed me and I get everything I need without all the other stuff. So through Black Beauty's eyes, I'm sure he liked the end of the book when he gets to be at pasture and just enjoy the rest of his life outside of Urban London as a cart horse. but we're seeing actually a resurgence of horses in society in different ways. Aquine therapy is a very up-and-coming field of using horses to treat post-traumatic stress,

to treat at-risk children, anybody who suffered trauma. So in my adopted town here in Grand Junction, we have two equine therapy centers, and they're seeing great results of using horses. to treat trauma victims or at-risk children. And again, I think that what that speaks to is our innate bond or our innate relationship, often an unspoken relationship that we have with this other animal, that we don't really have with any other animal on the planet,

save the dog and perhaps cats, I suppose, although cats kind of do their own thing. Yeah, but just to end off, I mean, you, I'm struck by, how you describe horses as a man-made creation, that it's one of the most important inventions in human history, that maybe even without humans, they might have ended up, as you say, joining other large mammals in a museum display somewhere.

Given the history, given the ups and downs of the history of the horse, is that possible again? Could that happen still in the future? As I say, we're not really, when you think of humanity, we're not really truly human without the horse and the horse isn't a horse without humanity. The horse is an animal that is roaming the grasslands.

It is what it is, but it's not what we think of the horse or a true horse, just like we aren't truly human without the horse given this intertwined and inseparable history. I think the horse just continues to redefine its role in human society and a good example of that would be the equine therapy.

or people returning to true green farming techniques where, you know, you have people literally hooking horses up to a scratch bowl, scratch mold board plow and plowing horses in the true organic sense of it. So I think it's just redefining its role and in our, perhaps not maybe our history, but in our society. And what it means, you know, to be a horse and to be human has certainly changed over time and it will continue to change. But I certainly don't see this relationship ever going away because it is just so innate,

I think, to both species. And it speaks to who and what we are together. How the heck is it that you don't have any horses yourself? I'm kind of scared of horses. I have a very healthy fear of horses. And it goes back to being a kid is that I was kind of stunned. and mesmerized by how big they were when I'd go to the local petting zoo. And I think given a very busy schedule of teaching full-time at the university, as a true

Canadian, I coach the hockey team here at Colorado Macy University, I have a 25-pound cockapoo named Steve and a cat named Little Big Scout. So I think it's just from a time commitment, I don't have time to donate to a horse. And they are, and I don't want to scare people. they're extremely expensive for the upkeep of horses as well. And I think you have to kind of be all in it. And I don't have time for that. But the good news is my neighbors have horses.

The rodeo coach here at CMU has horses. So the rugby coach here has horses. So if I ever want to ride a horse, they're really, literally next door. And I do get to ride their beautiful horses. So I get all the benefit of the horse without actually having to own one. Tim, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Really fascinating. Oh, you're very welcome.

Thank you for having me. My pleasure. That was Timothy Weingard, Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of The Horse, A Galloping History of Humanity. Special thanks to Greg Mickelai and Colin Keefe at Colorado Mesa University

and to Jennifer Landels and Academy Cavalette. School for Historical Mounted Combat. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. This episode was produced by Matthew Laysen Rider.

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