Talk:Horse/Archive 1

message: Also, I added some stuff about coat colors and markings, but more can and should be said - I merely provided the framework. -- Bryan
:Is anyone here familiar enough with horse coat colors that he/she could add captions to the photos in the article?  Elf | Talk 22:13, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hiya, another newbie here, but I have a HND in equine studies, so I'm more than willing to lend a hand in the colours section, I've already created pages for skewbald, piebald, and oddbald.  Also I have extensive notes on many other subjects, from evolution, breed development and domestication, to tack and equipment, and methods of exercise for the competition horse. I'd be happy to include these subjects too.  --Poison_kitty 11:51, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stuff 

message: To whom it may concern: Please feel free to visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Dog breeds/Categories because I think that structuring Horse articles and Dog articles could take a similar tack--would be nice to use same subcategories for consistency. Elf | Talk 04:08, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dogs 

message: The general rule to be followed is to stick with the spelling conventions (American or British) used by the article when it was begun. (Otherwise we would find mentions of color and colour, etc., in the same article.)  Therefore I have reverted the change from "meter" to "metre." P0M 23:41, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The first version of this article is clearly in American English. But I'll let somebody else fix this article's spelling appropriately. :P --mav 01:52, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  spelling convention 

message: "The most common date of domestication of the horse and its first use as a means of transport is circa 2000 BC." This is Horse-S***. The Indo-Iranians were using horse-drawn chariots at the date. 4000-5000 is a better date, and do your homework.--FourthAve 10:48, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been harsh, but your dates are absurd. This article also lacks any documentation  -- which explains the absurdity. There is some good stuff in here, tho'. So, sportsfans, clean it up, and quote real authorities. --FourthAve 11:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: WP articles come at all stages of dilapidation. As long as nobody objects to your point, there is no reason to be harsh, the information probably just snuck in somehow and nobody spotted it. If you put a footnote with a reference to your change, people will know it is a more solid piece of information. dab (ᛏ) 16:08, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Domestication

message: Check Sredny Stog culture. An article, Dereivka, which is a site pertaining to this archaeological culture from Ukraine will be coming along; it's 4500-3500 BC, with a superabunance of very early horse remains (it was a meat animal), with equivocal evidence of horseback riding as well. EIEC has an enormous article on the horse, and I will be sending some of this along into this article; I will resist turning this article into a meditation on the horse and its place in Indo-European studies. Domestication is sometime around or after 4000 BC. As I think about it, an article along the lines of Domestication of the Horse would be in order. I have enough good information for a short article. --FourthAve 17:08, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Domestication

message: At the moment this entry under other horse sports says it is popular in the South. The South where? the US? Britain? POV text here. Deirdre 01:35, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Edit boldly! ;-)  P0M 01:39, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hunter pacing 

message: I believe I may have seen one or two horses at some time in my life. (Joking, my point is, I'm no expert). I am interested in the horse as a pre-technological tool. I would like to know how mobile a group of humans riding horses could have been. That is:
*how fast can a horse move over a long period?
*how often does it have to be rested and for how long?
*what is the practical range of a rider per day over some weeks?
I don't know how to find out this material. Is this article the appropriate place for this material? If so, can someone put it in?
:It may be a little difficult to answer your question since several inventions have changed the parameters over the centuries.  Horses can trot at fairly rapid rates for considerable distances. The trot is a very efficient gait for getting someplace fast. On the other hand, for a male rider on a saddleless horse that has high withers (the two sharp-edged bones that come up right behind the end of the horse's neck, right where you want to sit), and without himself wearing the well-named jockey strap, the limits on travel would probably be human rather than equine.  With the invention of the saddle, the likelihood of testicular injury or discomfort would have been diminished although not totally, but the bouncing would have been strong. Modern horses have been bred over centuries to (most of them) have a tolerable trot, but even now some move like a jackhammer.  Stirrups were not invented until much later than the saddle. If I remember correctly, stirrups were known around 200 A.D. in Asia, but not until much later in Europe. If a rider is using stirrups and has figured out how to post, then the rider can probably tolerate trotting longer than can the horse. 
:The distance per day that a horse can make in the short run is considerably longer than what a human can do. I think humans have made 50 miles/day, but without carrying backpacks. If I recall correctly, pony express stations were around 100 miles apart. The champion walkers among humans may be nomadic sheep herding peoples who regularly walk all day long. But I don't think humans could walk 100 miles/day for weeks at a time. Similarly, the pony express horses went from one station to the next and at that station the horse was left behind to eat grass and rest in the pasture and a fresh horse was ridden for the next hundred miles.  Chinese horses of fame were called "thousand li horses," which probably means that they could make around 300 miles in fairly continuous travel under emergency circumstances. But, again, that doesn't mean that these horses could rest overnight while their rider caught some sleep and then would be able to go on for another long trip. For one thing, horses spend a fair amount of time eating grass.
:I don't have ready access to figures. There should be readily available information on the pony express riders and their mounts. There should be on-line information on endurance races (particularly with Arabian mounts) that would indicate the outer range of single-jaunt trips.
:If the real question is how fast a mounted group of people could move over vast distances, then the most realistic records (if they can be found) would be those for the movement of Mongol (Hun) troops from the Far East into and through Central Asia, and on into Europe. Those times would give a pretty realistic range of values for length of march vs. speed during the march. Another, more peaceful, model would be the amount of time it took the pioneers to move from the east coast of the U.S. to destinations on the prairie during pioneer days. In both cases, I think that journeys of, let's say, half the horizontal extent of the continental USA would be matters of months, not matters of years.  
:If horses were walking over the prairie and so could eat as they walked along, they might make 25 miles/day. At that rate it would take around 4 months to go from coast to coast assuming that their hooves held up well and there were no other major problems. Walking at 3 miles per hour for 8+ hours/day, a human being with some way or other to keep well fed and buy new boots from time to time could make it in about the same time. A rider could go a little faster than a walking man, but much of the real difference would be in how much the person could take along with him/her over hundreds of miles. So the reality is probably that the horses main utility in rapid movement would be the fact that they could pull wagons laden with tools and materials that humans would need but couldn't carry for themselves. Whether a wagon is pulled by oxen or by horses probably doesn't make much difference in terms of speed, but oxen can pull heavier loads. The real utility of the horse for human mobility lies in those situations where it is necessary to move humans relatively rapidly over medium distances -- the cavalry and the pony express. P0M 04:49, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Horse as a tool 

message: Someone has been adding vernacular terms to the list of equine anatomical names. Probably we should keep these weeded out. P0M 04:49, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Please maintain this page 

message: Does anyone have any free-license pictures of a stable that we could add to that article?  Most of the horse pictures I can find are of horses in beautiful fields or horses doing exciting things.  A horse in a stable might be a good picture to add to this article, too, since it's very relevant to the topic.  -- Creidieki 23:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos for [[stable]] article 

message: The webmaster of www.equiworld.net claims that parts of this article were taken from this website without permission and that those are a copyright violation. Gerrit CUTEDH 19:37, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Which parts, specifically, and where and to whom did this webmaster make the claim? If so, then the offending passages can be removed, but it would help in the resolution to be pointed to the specific detail- a search may miss something.--cjllw | TALK 22:20, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

text: There are no copyright notices on that web site and I notice a lot of the articles are contributed by external parties and are almost certainly not original research. I had a quick scan of some of the topics such as history and markings and found no obvious correlation between the articles. How did the webmaster make these claims? Garglebutt / (talk) 06:42, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, thanks...although the absence of a specific copyright notice on the site does not mean that its content (insofar as it contains any original research) is not copyright-eligible. However, if the site's own content does not originate there, then that's a different story (but copyright might then be claimable by the external originator). Anyway, I agree, by cursory examination there doesn't seem to be any correlation.--cjllw | TALK 07:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright violation 

message: I've changed some scientific names. Previous name of these animals (tarpan, wild horse & Donkey/Wild Ass) was mainly based on the list of mammals published by Wilson and Reeder in 1993. Their list was based on the code of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (www.iczn.org). Thus the oldest name was used: Equus caballus for the horse and Equus asinus for the Donkey/Ass. These names were first given to the domesticated forms and this had created confusion. However, in 2003 to end the confusion of the names, the Commission ruled that the name for each of the wild species listed in their publication (see reference) is not invalid by virtue of being predated by a name based on a domestic form.
The following names are hereby placed on the Official List of Specific Names in Zoology:
(a) africanus Heuglin & Fitzinger, 1866, as published in the binomen Equus africanus (North African wild ass) (Mammalia);
(b) ferus Boddaert, 1785, as published in the binomen Equus ferus (Russian wild horse, tarpan) (Mammalia);
(c) ...etc....
Website of International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: http://www.iczn.org
The publication (Opinion 2027) can be ordered there for free.
Main reference: International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 2003. Opinion 2027 (Case 3010). Usage of 17 specific names based on wild species which are pre-dated by or contemporary with those based on domestic animals (Lepidoptera, Osteichthyes, Mammalia): conserved. Bull.Zool.Nomencl., 60:81-84. 
Pmaas 21:54, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Equus ferus and Equus africanus 

message: A lot of the external links on this page are very "unencyclopedic". I think someone needs to trim out the rest! --Malcolm Morley 21:11, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: I need your help if you know something about horses.  I've create a new template for adding a standardized infobox to each horse listed in List of horse breeds.  The template is shown here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Horse breeds and there's a sample with minimal information in American Paint Horse.  The problem is that I don't really know what should or could go in the box. For example, for the  Dog breeds template, we can identify specific major breed registry organizations. But for horses, is that true? And what else makes sense to go in the table--e.g., "type"? (Draft, pony,...what else?)  Please respond at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Horse breeds. Thanks!  Elf | Talk 23:20, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think you need Common nicknames and Alternative names. Height would be useful. Breed societies would certainly be useful. --Malcolm Morley 07:39, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: New horse breed template--need your help