In the last 2 centuries, we have bred horses for speed, achieving records in that direction. But the downside is that they have become extremely inbred! (see plateau in recent decades)
Aria Schrecker (@Aria_Babu)
With the possible exception of broiler chickens, no creature has been so genetically optimized as the thoroughbred horse.
Read more about how we made the ultimate race horse today in Works in Progress: worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
🐎 Secretariat, the greatest racehorse of all time, had a heart that weighed 10kg, twice the size of a regular horse's.
🐎 We have been consistently recording the ancestry of thoroughbreds in the General Stud Book since 1791.
🐎 Breeders discovered that horses from Arabia, Central Asia and North Africa were often faster. So the Genghis Khan of thoroughbred horses is an Arabian stallion called the Darley Arabian, brought to England in 1704. He’s an ancestor of 95% of all modern thoroughbreds.
🐎 The first records of horse domestication show us selecting for stronger backs, lower anxiety and shorter generations.
🐎 In the Bronze Age, people bred horses for leopard spotting, which incidentally, caused night blindness.
🐎 Medieval warhorses were much smaller than today’s massive beasts. They stood at about 14 hands high, roughly the size of a pony.
Link
The ultimate horse - Works in Progress Magazine
Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost?
worksinprogress.co
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