How horses shaped the modern world, from the origins of pants to life-saving vaccines
'We wear pants because of horses. Prior to riding horses, no one wore pants,' says historian
*Originally published on Sept. 10, 2024.
Somewhere in the grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe, more than 5,500 years ago, a young hunter was the first person to ride a horse.
Historian Timothy Winegard says he likes to think of this person as a teenager on a dare who jumped on the back of a horse — and in that moment, changed the world.
He argues that the history of the horse is the history of humankind.
"Horses are intertwined in our own history to the point that we overlook their importance in history because they've seemingly just always been there," Winegard, an associate professor of history at Colorado Mesa University, told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.
In his book, The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Winegard traces how the horse shaped societies, economies and cultures and details how the "centaurian pact" guided human history for millennia.
Winegard spoke with Ayed about the powerful impact the horse has made in our everyday lives. Here is part of their conversation.
The First World War would have been, possibly, the last time that we would've seen horses used on a mass scale in modern warfare. I remember in my time living in London, there's a monument dedicated to the role of the horse in [the First World War] and how that contributed to the development of democracy.
I wonder how much recognition there is in the West of horses as a tool of war, that brought the world that we live in today?
Yeah, I think you're talking about [the war memorial] at Hyde Park, it's very sombre and it's engraved. The [animals] they had no choice, whether that's pigeons or horses or dogs or camels, elephants — all the animals that we've used in warfare. We have to remember that horses were conscripted into our human warfare, whether the cause was noble or nefarious.
What's interesting 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 armies were fuelled by oats, not oil — and there were certainly more ponies than panzers in the Wehrmacht or the German military.
In 1939 when they invade Poland only 15 per cent of the German military is mechanized — 85 per cent run on horsepower. By 1944 that number is only 10 per cent mechanized.
So after D-Day in Normandy, when the Canadians and Americans and British are a 100 per cent mechanized, the German army is only 10 percent mechanized and ... this blows people's minds.
It's actually the heavy reliance that the Germans had on horses that helped save the world from Hitler's sadism and Nazi regime and gave us democracy, at least in the Western world. Now the Soviets who essentially helped win the war, don't get to enjoy that democracy.
But it's startling the propaganda that's put out before the war by Joseph Goebbels and his film reels about this Nazi mechanized juggernaut. These are used by allied propagandists in Canada and the United States, even though they know it's not true.
They use the same footage that Goebbels 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."
These are in all the movie reels. We still watch documentaries on the Second World War seeing Goebbels' original propaganda, promoting this myth of a German mechanized juggernaut. When in fact, they were 15 per cent mechanized at best during any time of the war.
Wow. Back to the idea of how much the horse has contributed to the modern world that we have today, again, through warfare. How well-known do you think that is?
It's fairly well-known because when we see Hollywood [movies] or the Wild West shows, we always see people on horseback to the point that we forget what they are. We look at horses without actually looking at horses. They're just there and we don't see them.
They're a living machine. These animals who have always been there, 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 a hundred.
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.
The Hollywood motion picture was started by the horse.- Timothy Winegard
I bet people don't know when they get their DTaP [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis] vaccines that the horse made the original vaccines for both diphtheria and tetanus. Horses produced a serum that was 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 was the leading cause of death in America and Canada prior to the vaccine amongst children under 14. So, thank you horses, for us not having to watch our children slowly suffocate to death.
And 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.
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 archeological 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 horses gave rise to pants.
It's extraordinary.
Yes. The very first motion picture ever, the birth of Hollywood, is because of horses. [There was] a bet to see whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while galloping.
[Leland] Stanford, the founder of Stanford University, got a person to take multiple pictures in a row using tripwires on a series of cameras, and he spun these pictures on a zoopraxiscope that he invented on a glass plate. 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 right there. So the Hollywood motion picture was started by the horse.
Our day-to-day lives and our day-to-day existence in our modern society was hauled into place and dictated by the horse.
*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Matthew Lazin-Ryder.
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