Contemporary Authors

• If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession Atlantic Books (London, England), 2012
• The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. If wishes were horses : a memoir of equine obsession https://lccn.loc.gov/2012427321 Forrest, Susanna. If wishes were horses : a memoir of equine obsession / Susanna Forrest. London : Atlantic, 2012. ix, 357 p. : ill. ; 22 cm SF284.52.F67 A3 2012 ISBN: 9780857891273 (hbk.)0857891278 (hbk.)9780857891280 (pbk.)0857891286 (pbk.) 2. The age of the horse : an equine journey through human history https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003334 Forrest, Susanna, author. The age of the horse : an equine journey through human history / Susanna Forrest. First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition. New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017. xi, 418 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm SF283 .F67 2017 ISBN: 9780802126511 (hardcover)

• Susanna Forrest - http://susannaforrest.com/about

  About Susanna forrest

  I'm the author of If Wishes Were Horses, a Memoir of Equine Obsession (2012), and The Age of the Horse, which was published by Atlantic Books in the UK in October 2016 and will be published by Grove Atlantic in the US in May 2017. Hara Shobo in Tokyo published the Japanese translation in November 2017. I began researching horse history late in 2004 after I left ER magazine, and my blog is a repository for the equestrian curios and news stories I've found along the way.

  I've written for the New York Times Opinionator blogs, Spiegel Online, the Guardian, The Atlantic, Literary Hub, Times, Telegraph, Literary Review, Freitag, Eve, New Woman and the New Statesman among others. I'm a member of the Equine Research Network.

  In 2016 I won the Sophie Coe Prize for an essay on food history called “'Horsemeat is Certainly Delicious': Anxiety, Xenophobia and Rationalism at a Nineteenth-Century American Hippophagic Banquet." This essay is a chapter in the collection Equine Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, 1700–Present, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld. It will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

  I've also contributed a chapter on the new equestrian scene in China to Equestrian Cultures in Global and Local Arenas, edited by Miriam Adelman and Kirrilly Thompson (Springer). It's called "The importation and disruption of the new Chinese equestrian landscape".

  Here are links to some of the work I've done that's available online:

  For The Atlantic's Object Lessons blog: The Troubled History of Horsemeat in America.

  For Literary Hub, How Byron Invented the Wild Horse.

  For the New York Times' Menagerie blog: talking to horses through riding, learning to ride all over again, Tav and Sasa.

  For the Telegraph: the history of hippophagy, sidesaddle, Pippi Longstocking and pony books.

  For Spiegel Online: the 2013 Horse Meat Scandal.

  For the Guardian: the other big "C", being a drag queen, erotica for women and wife auditions.

  For the Literary Review: Hanging Up Our Spurs, a review of Ulrich Raulff's Farewell to the Horse.

  On Medium: Liberating Diana – how a Danish artist seeks to commemorate a wayward princess.

  For Zoomorphic: Athletes or Anarchists? How the misunderstanding between humans and horses makes their domestication possible.

  For the Scotsman: on Joyce Carole Oates' Rape: A Love Story.

  For the New Statesman: on Jonny Trunk's Dirty Fan Mail: a life in rude letters.

  En Français: a translation of the history of hippophagy piece in Courrier International.

  For Gridskipper.com: ramblings on and around Berlin, ditto Momondo.com.

  Talks and interviews: On horsemeat history: BBC World Service's The Food Chain, 29 October 2017; ABC Saturday Extra, 16 September 2017; On horses, PTSD and Anxiety: BBC World Service's The Forum, 22 August 2016. On pony books: BBC Radio 4 Pony Tales, September 2016. On women-only remount depots in World War One, The Equine Army, BBC1 West (2 June 2014) and BBC4 (29 September 2014). On sidesaddle, Countryfile, BBC1 (10 June 2012). 2012 Daily Telegraph Way with Words Literary Festival, Dartington Hall. Speaker, Galloping History Symposium at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, April 2014; Horse Tales: Writing the Equine in Children's Literature at Homerton College, Cambridge University, UK, May 2016; Guildford Literary Festival, October 2016 and Wigtown Book Festival, UK, September 2017.

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Forrest, Susanna: THE AGE OF THE HORSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Forrest, Susanna THE AGE OF THE HORSE Atlantic Monthly (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2651-1
An encyclopedic account of horses and those who love them, put them to work, and eat them."Any beginning in nature is arbitrary," declares Berlin-based writer and editor Forrest by way of opening. She sets hers at 56 million years ago, when the first identifiable horselike creature hit the ground, one that might just as easily have been an early tapir or giraffe or even moose. "Dawn horses" had digits that morphed into hooves at about the time hominins entered the paleontological record, when horses became truly distinct from zebras and donkeys. From then on, the human-horse connection has been strong. Forrest is fascinated by these early appearances and especially by the discovery of atavistic horse strains that ran around in the remoter steppes of Russia and Central Asia. As she notes, one hybrid population, bred as warhorses, was devastated by, yes, war when the Russian civil war broke out in 1918. The author's sprawling narrative takes in all manner of things, from Lord Byron's championing of a certain "Tartar steed" to the Linnean taxonomy of horses, from wild horse legislation to Nazi breeding experiments. Sometimes the narrative can seem a little, well, arbitrary as Forrest works these diffuse matters to greater or lesser length. Some parts are a little underdone, while others flow nicely--her account of the development of Lipizzaner-like dancing horses is particularly strong--and still others go on a little too long, though not without some interest, such as her account of the horsemeat controversy that swept across the news a few years back, exposing Americans to the idea that some people actually ate horses, "the odd one out in the butcher's canon of beef, pork, lamb, and poultry; the cheap, corrupt meat." In the hands of a nimbler interpreter like Susan Orlean or Diane Ackerman, this material would have sprung to richer life. The prose sometimes plods like a Clydesdale, but overall, the narrative is quite good, making a worthy addition to the equestrian library.
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The Age of the Horse: An Equine
Journey through Human History
Maggie Reagan
Booklist.
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p7. From Book Review Index Plus.
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The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History. By Susanna Forrest.
May 2017.432p. illus. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (9780802126511). 636.1.
From our earliest days, the evolutionary histories of humans and horses have been intertwined. Horses have been our farming coworkers and fellow soldiers as well as revered athletes, subjects of art, and, sometimes, our food. In clear, introspective prose that underscores the astonishing depth of her research, Forrest tracks human history through the eyes of our equine companions. Eight sections are arranged thematically; Forrest discusses briefly the evolution and domestication of early horses before moving into their roles as working animals (plow and carriage horses), as a cultural staple (the royal dancing horses--haute ecole--that perform in Versailles), and as a symbol of wealth and power (China's exclusive polo resorts). Illustrations are few, but the text is full of striking insight; a chapter on horsemeat--a delicacy to some, taboo for others--draws surprising parallels between cultures, while a final chapter on horses as instruments of war--including therapy horses who help returning military vets deal with PTSD--is unexpectedly tender. "I had traveled to Mongolia to see wild horses, to Versailles to see them dance," Forrest writes. "In Ohio and Massachusetts I'd seen working horses, in Beijing Equus luxuriosus and in that dingy auction house the horses as pounds of flesh and hide." And it is indeed that personal touch, that devotion, that elevates this volume from fascinating history to work of art.--Maggie Reagan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Reagan, Maggie. "The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History." Booklist,
15 Mar. 2017, p. 7. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490998349 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=90847252. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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A partner like no other; People and horses
The Economist.
423.9043 (June 3, 2017): p75(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
How an animal shaped human history
The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History. By Susanna Forrest. Grove Atlantic; 432 pages. Atlantic Books.
Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of our Relationship. By Ulrich Raulff. Allen Lane.
SIX THOUSAND years ago wild horses roamed the plains and steppes of the world. They were like many prey: fleet of foot, alert to threats and largely unaggressive. Then, in the Copper Age, the Botai people east of the Urals found a way to hunt them--for their meat and skins--and, later, to domesticate them. In horses, the Botai and succeeding civilisations found the best of partners. Horses are seen to be quick-witted and forgiving. Unusually, unlike almost all mammals other than humans, they sweat to cool themselves, which means they can work harder and run faster, for a long time.
This last attribute was central to the horse's usefulness. Over the millennia, people have made full use of this equine companion, as two superb new books relate. "The Age of the Horse" by Susanna Forrest and "Farewell to the Horse" by Ulrich Raulff pay homage to the role of the horse in forging history--and more. Neither book purports to be a comprehensive equi-story; instead, by arranging their narratives thematically rather than chronologically, both authors have granted themselves the freedom to range as widely as the ancient wild horses, the Takhi and the Tarpan, once did, grazing on a pasture rich in anecdote, allegory and pathos as well as in historical importance.
Ms Forrest introduces her book as a "wander down six bridle roads", each relating to a different way in which people have made use of horses. It is full of the sort of detail that gets edited out of more traditional histories. The Sybarites in sixth-century southern Italy "taught their warhorses to caper to the sound of flutes". In ancient Ghana the royal family kept their mounts in the palace, "where they slept on mats and were tended to by three grooms each who held copper pots to catch their urine". The bidet of French-bathroom fame was named after the 19th-century Parisian scrub horse (you straddle both). In the midst of the second world war, the Heck brothers, whipped on by Hermann Goring, traversed Europe to capture some of the last remaining wild ponies, from which they attempted to breed a genetically pure race to populate the parks of Berlin.
In addition to these historical nuggets Ms Forrest also presents a thesis: that horse power allowed
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people to explore, to conquer and to develop. "Britain owed its industrial and agricultural revolutions not just to gentlemen engineers and labouring masses, but to the broad chests, treelike legs and willing nature of its horses," she writes. Victorian London rang with the language of horsemanship: the clopping hooves of cabbies, vanners, sweepers, vestry horses, costers' ponies, brewery Shires, bussers, growlers and trammers as well as the riding horses of the gentry. By 1901, when there were more horses in towns than in the country, working horses consumed almost exactly the same amount of grain and hay as was produced by British farmers.
But their days as "forced labourers", as Mr Raulff describes it, were numbered. "For a century, the oat-powered engine was the universal and irreplaceable power unit in the forced mechanisation of the world," he writes--until "the last generation of the 19th century realised that as motors, horses were costly, sensitive and unreliable…the mechanical horse is lighter, stronger, faster, more enduring, cleaner, easier to steer." The change, when it came, was rapid. In 1901 over 1m horses still worked on British farms. By 1956 there were 147,000--and 370,000 tractors.
"Farewell to the Horse" ostensibly covers the period of the "long 19th century", which starts with Napoleon and ends with the first world war. But to call it a history underplays its scope. Mr Raulff gallops through time and space, art criticism, philosophy and economics, plaiting in tales of Kafka, Tolstoy and Comanche, the hard-drinking stallion who was the only non-Indian survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. His is a category-defying, often dizzying, piece of writing; both books are imbued with hippophilia.
Over the past century horses in the West have evolved from labourers into what Mr Raulff calls a "part-time job as a recreational item, a mode of therapy, a status symbol and a source of pastoral support for female puberty". (Although, as Ms Forrest points out, in 2011 60% of all horses and 95% of donkeys were working in the developing world, with the money generated for each animal being sufficient to support a family of up to 20.) In the developed world they have been replaced with machines. The irony is hard to miss: humans tamed horses and put them to work until they invented something that worked at greater speed and lower cost, which replaced them. Could humans one day make themselves obsolescent in the same way?
In a section about war, Ms Forrest tells of 12 cavalry horses, veterans of the Battle of Waterloo, that were bought at auction by the king's surgeon, who brought them home, operated on them and turned them loose to graze. "One morning…the surgeon saw the 12 horses form a line, shoulder to shoulder, then, without a cue, charge forward at a gallop. After a few strides they spun and retreated as formally as in a drill." Each day, he watched as "his old cavalry horses, flecked white where their coats had grown back over their scars, enacted this enigmatic ritual and went to war together once more in the cool green parkland of the Home Counties."
The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History. By Susanna Forrest.
Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of our Relationship.
By Ulrich Raulff.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A partner like no other; People and horses." The Economist, 3 June 2017, p. 75(US).
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Review: Non-fiction: Pigtails flying: A book about horses and those who love them has Lucy Cavendish galloping back to her childhood: If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession by Susanna Forrest 432pp, Atlantic, pounds 16.99
The Guardian (London, England).
(Mar. 3, 2012): Arts and Entertainment: p7. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Lucy Cavendish
I remember, as a child, I used to canter through the woods: in my mind, I was a horse. I'd flare my nostrils, paw the ground and dash through the woods jumping logs. It drove my siblings mad. They couldn't bear my endless whinnying and insistence that they stroke my "mane" and feed me apples. I think everyone thought I'd grow out of my obsession, but I didn't. I became obsessed with owning my own pony. I bought endless copies of Pony magazine and wrote letters to their editors about the horse I didn't actually have. Then, if the letters about "Calypso" were printed, I'd cut them out and paste them into my pony scrapbook. I entered the WH Smith Own a Pony competition every year.
I badgered my mother for a pony on a daily basis, saving up every penny to buy it the accoutrements it needed - brand new head collar, grooming kit, hoof oil, saddle and bridle. I read endless horsey novels by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Ruby Ferguson and KM Peyton, whose 1968 bestseller Fly-By-Night (part of the Roth Hollis series) was my favourite.
Which is why If Wishes Were Horses is the book for me. It is subtitled "a memoir of equine obsession", and in it, Susanna Forrest describes her ongoing fascination with horses with such clarity, such a feel for how horses can affect your life, that she took me right back to a childhood of Thelwell and Follyfoot. Like Forrest, I was desperate to cadge rides from anyone; I rode as and when I could. I once sneaked into a field and leapt on a pony bareback I was so desperate. It immediately bucked me off.
Forrest's grandmother was a saddler's daughter, and she herself rode from when she was tiny,
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recalling her mother's hand clapping "my fat little leg to the saddle". She describes the predominantly young girl world of caring for a pony, the ritualistic grooming, the plaiting of the mane, the way horses almost become like dolls for the young girls who want to care for them. There is an oddly practical lyricism in her descriptions of this care: "I groomed Tango with the plastic currycomb when he was moulting, turning the air into a snowstorm of gingery tufts of hair, like being caught in a vacuum bag."
Hers is a richly evocative book, describing the smells, the sounds, "the clanking of the fork on the wheelbarrow". There is a chapter called "Gymkhana" that took me right back to the Betjeman poem "Hunter Trials" ("It's awfully bad luck on Diana / Her ponies have swallowed their bits / She fished down their throats with a spanner / And frightened them all into fits") - girls with pigtails flying around on naughty ponies while mothers fussed and bossed.
But Forrest is not only concerned with the childhood love of ponies. Along with her poetic recounting of riding again now she is in her late 20s - booking a private lesson in a riding school in the suburbs of Berlin where she now lives - she has also discovered all sorts of nuggets about horses. For example, we apparently ate horses for 90,000 years until, 5,500 years ago, we decided to ride them. "There is little fat in horse meat . . . it makes excellent sashimi." Elizabeth I designed for herself a riding skirt to cover her stirrups - women rode side-saddle, of course, and her skirt was covered in black velvet and adorned with pearls - and hunted stags with silver- tipped arrows until her old age.
Forrest visits hunts, talks to the people who run the Pony Club, researches horse rescue centres and goes to endless farms. She does surveys, takes advice on Equus Eroticus ("the community of adult human pony erotic role players") and her pages benefit from hectares of groundwork. This is not just a tale of one woman's love, but of swathes of people who are involved in the equine world.
It is packed full of tales of golden horses, chariots and children riding round the streets of Brixton. And she reports the conversation with a woman from Sydney who describes "the horse that only I could ride". We've all had that experience. Mine was called Roger (yes, really), a fiery chestnut. We stayed together until he was 26. When he died, I held his head and wept and wailed for him.
By middle-age, women often call their horses "my man"; they change to a different type of love object. But love is certainly the appropriate word - Forrest describes a horse she is about to have a lesson on: "She was also beautiful, the glossy black of a lacquer-work cabinet, polished and nourished till the highlights of her coat were white under the barn light." Forrest knows that the connection between rider and horse as you gallop, flying through the air, is almost indescribably strong. Nothing comes near it.
To order If Wishes Were Horses for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
Lucy Cavendish
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"Review: Non-fiction: Pigtails flying: A book about horses and those who love them has Lucy Cavendish galloping back to her childhood: If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession by Susanna Forrest 432pp, Atlantic, pounds 16.99." Guardian [London, England], 3 Mar. 2012, p. 7. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A281924800 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=151d5df4. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A281924800
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"Forrest, Susanna: THE AGE OF THE HORSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105006/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b44e09c0. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Reagan, Maggie. "The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 7. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490998349/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=90847252. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "A partner like no other; People and horses." The Economist, 3 June 2017, p. 75(US). Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493846546/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=befd9ddc. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Review: Non-fiction: Pigtails flying: A book about horses and those who love them has Lucy Cavendish galloping back to her childhood: If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession by Susanna Forrest 432pp, Atlantic, pounds 16.99." Guardian [London, England], 3 Mar. 2012, p. 7. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A281924800/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=151d5df4. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

• The Times
  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-age-of-the-horse-an-equine-journey-through-human-history-by-susanna-forrest-phgcd5pr6
  Word count: 1143

  he Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History by Susanna Forrest

  Reviewed by Melanie Reid
  Melanie Reid

  October 29 2016, 12:01am, The Times
  Przewalski’s horse is a rare, ancient subspecies
  Przewalski’s horse is a rare, ancient subspecies
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  Those of us afflicted with a love of horses, sad souls that we are, belong to a church so broad that it includes everyone from the great poets and philosophers to Katie Price in her pink riding jacket. Like a weakness for drink or an appreciation of art, horse worship is woven into the human psyche, defying logic and classification.

  Susanna Forrest is the outstanding writer at the erudite end of horse madness. Her 2012 memoir of her own obsession, If Wishes Were Horses, was terrific; this next homage, expanding and reinterpreting our cultural relationship with equines, is equally fresh and clever.

  To well-rehearsed facts, she brings new detail. All bookish horsey children know how it began, this love affair, when prehistoric Eohippus crawled from the forest floor and evolved into Przewalski’s horse, the wild, dun-coloured relic of the Mongolian steppes. But who knew, for instance, of Carl Hagenbeck, the German wild animal merchant of the 1890s, who had 52 newborn Przewalski foals wrested from their mothers and sent on the long trek to Hamburg? When Mongolians protested at the cruelty, they were whipped. Only 28 of the startled, woolly youngsters survived, to be dispersed to zoos around the world.

  Humans, Forrest says, have the lamentable habit of loving too late. Wild horses, even as they faced extinction, caught western imagination. The tale of Mazeppa, the 17th-century Polish nobleman who dallied with another man’s wife and as punishment was strapped to the back of a wild horse, was first romanticised by Byron, then became a trope that endured 150 years across high and low entertainment — from compositions by Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Delacroix to pub names and Staffordshire porcelain. On the European stage, large-scale hippodramas, using real animals to re-enact Mazeppa’s horse, were today’s rock concerts. The wild horse became code for sexual desire, and, in America, freedom.

  Later, under the patronage of Himmler and Goering, Przewalski horses were roped into Nazi eugenics. Just as the Nazis tried to re-create mythical Aryan aurochs from highland cows, brahman cattle and bison, so they took Przewalskis from zoos and tried to breed pure primeval horses.

  During the European Renaissance, horse riding became an intellectual endeavour (cf England, where haute école wa s dismissed as “sundrie sorts of superfluous dansing and pransing” — which is precisely why it’s taken 250 years for us to succeed at dressage). In Versailles, the Marquis de la Bigne took collection of his horse to such extremes that it took him an hour to canter slowly across the courtyard, advancing 5cm per stride. Another French rider taught his horse to canter backwards.
  Whistlejacket by George Stubbs
  Whistlejacket by George Stubbs
  ALAMY

  Susanna Forrest was once an editor at Erotic Review. You can tell. Her exuberant description of watching today’s horses and riders train at Versailles makes it sound like great sex. Backs arched, rumps rounded, nostrils tensed — “the air was disturbed by their energy”. Her writing is occasionally sublime: in America she meets a 19.3-hands high carthorse, rising from a small pen “like an over-yeasted loaf”, and watches as little children stretch up, “placing starfish hands on his pink nose, threatening to lose little fists in his giant nostrils”. At such moments, for the horse-addicted, a book can get no better than this.

  There are fascinating nuggets: who knew that horses thrive better on classical music than jazz, or that in the 19th century the French workaday horse was called a bidet (hence the bathroom furniture; both are straddled) but was renamed a poney as a result of Anglomania. And Mick Jagger must be descended from cartmen, known as jaggers.

  My favourite passages were the depiction of Victorian London, a city powered by horse. There were vanners, the white Ford Transits of their day; street sweepers, pulling rotating brushes on a belt; coal deliverers; vestry horses, collecting refuse; drays; trammers; bussers; and then, lowest of the low, the broken-kneed night-time cabbers, the ones too worn-out to be used in daylight “for fear of being waylaid by distressed ladies in large hats”.

  Her exuberant description of horses training makes it sound like great sex

  Cab horses did a 40-mile day, six days a week, breathing air that was a miasma of dung, horse sweat — and death. They died on the road after not much more than three years. Two out of three bussers lasted an average of five years’ service, worn out by the stop-start deadweight of 39 passengers and the omnibus itself. Tram horses lasted only four, so heavy was their burden.

  Clear-eyed, Forrest demonstrates how, without horses, we would not be checking our smartphones; we’d still be living like the scruff on Poldark. In the 18th century, Robert Bakewell bred horses selectively and created the genetic capital — the Shire — which first enabled the agricultural revolution and then, seamlessly, the industrial one.

  Horses drove Arkwright’s spindles, powered brick production, and carved out the landscape in preparation for roads, canals, railways. Horses enabled steam, which enabled electricity and then the internal combustion engine, which signed their death warrant: in 1947-48 more than 200,000 horses were put down in the UK, 40 per cent of them under three years of age.

  They won us our freedom too, in war, a sacrifice now acknowledged. I had never heard the story of 12 cavalry horses badly wounded at Waterloo (where 20,000 others died). Rescued by the king’s surgeon, Astley Cooper, and with the bullets cut out of them, they were retired to grass. Thereafter, in a poignant ritual in the field, the free horses daily formed themselves into a line, shoulder to shoulder, and galloped forward in a charge. After a few yards, they spun and wheeled in unison. Then they started grazing.

  Edwin Muir, in his poem The Horses, wrote, “that free servitude still can pierce our hearts”. Forrest, a social anthropologist by training, heart truly pierced, has written a profound historical love story. Be warned: she can go on a bit. In places, she diverts into extended scholarly essays about China and America’s meat trade, but I enjoyed the bits in-between so much that I forgive her. Her book is original, cerebral and from the heart. Thinking jodhpur-wearers will love it.
  The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History by Susanna Forrest, Atlantic, 418pp, £20

• The Telegraph
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9146381/If-Wishes-Were-Horses-An-Equine-Obsession-by-Susanna-Forrest-review.html
  Word count: 995

  If Wishes Were Horses: An Equine Obsession by Susanna Forrest: review
  Clover Stroud indulges in If Wishes Were Horses by Susanna Forrest.
  5 out of 5 stars
  Image 1 of 2
  Girl's best friend: The cover of National Velvet

  By Clover Stroud

  4:21PM GMT 15 Mar 2012

  When I mention my eight-year-old daughter’s love of ponies, people who do not understand horses, or who haven’t experienced their nobility or humanity, will snigger and point to that apparently inevitable post-Freudian conclusion that a girl’s love for her pony is born from an obvious auto-eroticism, or the sadomasochistic sensuality of leather, sweat and rough hair, of strong motion framed by danger. Anyone who understands horses knows that this is a load of rot.

  Tackling what exactly the appeal of ponies really is, while powerfully conveying her passion for them, Susannah Forrest has written a beautiful book about her own equine obsession, while casting her eye over the role horses have played in popular culture. Opening with descriptions of her Falabella obsession, and of anxieties she had as a child that she might grow too tall to ride a Derby winner, you quickly know you’re in the hands of a true addict.

  Weaving affectionate memories of ponies she has loved and lost, Forrest is most concerned with the role it played from the Industrial Revolution onwards, although she takes the reader on a brisk canter across the centuries, pointing out horse meat was a staple part of Stone Age man’s diet, but that it wasn’t until the Renaissance that equestrianism took on significance as a literary form.

  Forrest isn’t joking when she subtitles the book an equine obsession, because her descriptions of the ponies who have trotted into her life are dedicated and lengthy. More compelling for the general reader is her examination of why young girls, in particular, love ponies so much.

  The golden age of girls and ponies was born in the early 20th century when horses were to give girls an independence that was quite new. It was during the First World War that women tasted, in large numbers, the intoxicating independence experienced from the back of a horse; their brothers and fathers and husbands away, upper-class women in particular developed a taste for riding astride to hounds with the same bravery as their male counterparts, and perhaps a bit more skill.
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  If Wishes Were Horses by Susanna Forrest: review 02 Mar 2012

  Not everyone approved, and as late as 1914 King George forbade wives of officers from riding astride at horse shows, but by then the genie was fully out of the bottle. By the Thirties and Forties, horses and ponies had won their place within the hearts and minds of little girls. A whole literary genre grew up around them, started by Muriel Wace, writing under the name Golden Gorse, who declared “There is no greater pleasure in the world than riding a good horse.”

  The Pony Club was born in 1929, and by the mid-Thirties, every girl in the country had a crush on National Velvet, the eponymous heroine of Edith Bagnold’s novel, immortalised by Elizabeth Taylor on screen. A thirst for novels with names like Silver Snaffles grew; Joanna Cannan was one of the finest of these writers, although the horsey heroine without equal was undoubtedly the show jumper Pat Smythe, who travelled the world with her horses, combining an unequalled equine talent with an appetite for adventure and glamour.

  This truly was a golden age of riding, but so potent was the power of those ponies that by the end of that century, a government drugs adviser identified “equine addiction syndrome”.

  Danger has always been part of the attraction of horses, but in the rapidly developing litigious culture, this has had a devastating effect on riding schools, crippled by escalating insurance costs. Schools are no longer able to offer girls without the funds for lessons the chance to ride in return for helping out.

  It’s depressing, too, that Katie Price promoted the idea that a horse is an accessory, to be dressed up in pink bandages. When Forrest visits Olympia, she’s appalled by the halls filled with pink horsey trinkets, the accessories of action, as though buying into a retail experience of the dream has overtaken the thrilling, grubby exhilaration of what it’s really about.

  Horses, she laments, once “gave girls a corner of the world where they were freed from the burden of being ‘girls’, where they could be ambitious and brave and strong”, but this has been replaced by a world in which show jumps are pink and covered in glitter, and Price rides dressage displays in jackets with sequinned lapels.

  “There were no more heroines like Pat Smythe, sleeping in a cattle truck and covering up her black eyes with powder.”

  Still, this is not a lament for a lost age, but a reminder of the unique roles ponies can play in the lives of girls to make them feel strong and independent.

  One of the most interesting sections relates to work by the Swedish psychologist Sven Forsling, who set up a rehabilitation centre for truanting girls who’d fallen into drug abuse and sexual exploitation. It had a racing stables, where the girls were expected to look after their own horses, which made them feel brave. The strongest evidence of this comes from one of these girls, who, racing her horse around the track for the first time, declared “Yes! I am divine!”

  If Wishes Were Horses: An Equine Obsession

  by Susanna Forrest

  432PP, Atlantic Books t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £10.98)

• The Telegraph
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/9103626/If-Wishes-Were-Horses-by-Susanna-Forrest-review.html
  Word count: 835

  If Wishes Were Horses by Susanna Forrest: review
  'If Wishes Were Horses' by Susanna Forrest is an entertaining trot through the history of women and their horses
  4 out of 5 stars
  The bond between girls and horses is examined in Susanna Forrest's 'If Wishes Were Horses'
  The bond between girls and horses is examined in Susanna Forrest's 'If Wishes Were Horses' Photo: Alamy

  By Jane Shilling

  11:15AM GMT 02 Mar 2012

  The Queen loves them. Jordan adores them. And the former assistant editor of the Erotic Review finds them so mesmerising that she has now written a memoir about them. Horses and humans share an ancient bond. But the relationship between horses and women is an entirely separate mystery.

  Why do so many little girls spend their early years tending imaginary equines? And why do grown women with moderate athletic ability suddenly yearn to take up riding?

  Susanna Forrest’s memoir addresses these and many other questions. Forrest first sat on a horse when she was a baby. Five years later, her parents gave in to her demand for riding lessons.

  She never owned a longed-for pony, but nourished her obsession with riding-school ponies and a string of imaginary, almost mythic, steeds on which she fantasised about winning the Grand National. Her passion burned strongly for 11 years and then, weakened by university and an office job, it quietly expired.

  But one day when she was working in Berlin, Forrest spotted a trail of white hoof prints stencilled on the ground. “It was as though a herd of those elusive, magical horses from the pony books I’d read in my childhood had somehow slipped through into my grown-up urban life,” she writes. She began to follow the hoof prints through the city and they led her back to the lost childhood realm of sugar lumps and rising trot. She found a riding school in a Berlin suburb and began once again to inhabit a world populated by horses.
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  Forrest’s attempts to resume riding after an interval of a decade proved halting. The horses at her riding school responded sluggishly to her. Her muscle memory was patchy; she had to rub her aching thighs with Deep Heat.

  But reconnecting with the old magic of velvet muzzles made her curious to find out more about the strange connection between girls and ponies. “The first little girl who loved a pony ate it,” she writes in a chapter about the prehistory of humans and equines. In Siberia, Russian archaeologists excavated the Bronze Age grave of a Pazyryk priestess, buried with six geldings and a dish of horse meat.

  Then as now, horses represented power and a potent, disturbing sexuality. A woman on a horse can outclass a man, as Pat Smythe, the childhood heroine of would-be showjumpers of a certain age, resoundingly proved. The knowledge is both exhilarating and unsettling.

  Forrest’s book interweaves accounts of her Norfolk childhood and her Berlin riding lessons with a historical account of women’s horsemanship and excursions into the stranger byways of the horse world.

  Her approach is essayistic: she unearths the story of Mary Breese, an 18th-century Norfolk woman with a passion for hunting so fervent that she was buried with her mare.

  She admires the dash of the formidable 19th-century horsewomen Alice Hayes, who rode a zebra side-saddle, and Nannie Power O’Donoghue, the first person ever to ride clear over the steeplechase courses at Baldoyle, Fairyhouse and Punchestown on consecutive days.

  She discusses the phenomenon of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty; she discovers a Swedish equine centre for young offenders and a Brixton riding school. She interviews an American woman who worships the horse goddess Epona, and an Australian fetishist who belongs to The Other Pony Club, whose members dress up in bridles and hoof-shaped boots.

  There are some odd omissions: she writes perfunctorily about point-to-pointing, where women riders excel, and while she is fascinated by fox-hunting, she tends to treat it as a purely historical phenomenon.

  Her book is long, her chapters short, and somewhere toward the middle there is a sense that the material – fascinating though it is – has taken over, and the narrative arc has lost its tension. Forrest is an attractive stylist who writes with great energy, so even her detours are highly readable. It seems rather harsh to say that sharper editing would have produced a more focused text, but it is true, all the same.

  If Wishes Were Horses

  Susanna Forrest

  Atlantic, £16.99, 357pp

• Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/if-wishes-were-horses-a-memoir-of-equine-obsession-by-susanna-forrest-7576194.html
  Word count: 452

  If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession, By Susanna Forrest

  An appeal on behalf of the horseless

  Lucy Popescu
  Sunday 18 March 2012 00:00 GMT
  0 comments

  As a child it never occurred to me that my horsey existence might be the envy of pony-mad girls across the country. My late mother, Christine Pullein-Thompson, was the author of more than 100 children's books, mostly about horses. For pony-less children, such as Susanna Forrest, the Pullein-Thompson sisters and other writers such as Patricia Leitch, Monica Dickens and Ruby Ferguson, allowed them to indulge fantasies of owning and caring for a horse through their books.

  Forrest's homage to horses recalls the popularity of this pony literature, which reached its zenith in the 1970s when WH Smith launched its Win a Pony competition. But the British love of horses and young girls' enthusiasm for riding them still endures.

  Swiftly refuting the "pony-mad-girl of cliché", Forrest points out that "not all love is a simple sublimation of sexual desire". She eloquently describes how a horse allows "a preliminary equine sentimental education, where big emotions can be suffered and enjoyed". Forrest describes her childhood obsession with ponies and a return to riding in her thirties when she experiences a fear that she must conquer. Threaded through her personal journey are various examples of human interaction with horses ranging from the historical to the bizarre. She discovers a tomb from the Bronze Age in which a Pazyryk Priestess was buried with six geldings; talks to a member of the fetish group, The Other Pony Club; and explores the cult of the Celtic horse goddess, Epona.

  The once sexist approach to competitive riding is recorded. Marjorie Bullows was the first woman to ride "astride" at Olympia in 1922 and women were not allowed to show-jump at the Olympics until 1956. There is an illuminating chapter about Pat Smythe, one of Britain's best loved showjumpers who was ineligible to compete in 1952, but the Olympic team asked to borrow her best horse.

  Forrest's dissection of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty made me weep (again). Its vivid descriptions of the harshness of late 19th-century London from a horse's perspective contributed to the rise of animal rights groups.

  Riding for the Disabled is not mentioned but the therapeutic effects of bonding with a horse are shown in chapters on a Swedish riding school for the rehabilitation of young offenders and the Ebony Horse Club in Brixton, south London, catering for disadvantaged children. As Forrest shows, you don't have to be "posh" to be passionate about horses.

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• The Syndey Morning Herald
  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-age-of-the-horse-review-susanna-forrests-canter-through-equine-mysteries-20170223-gujhfs.html
  Word count: 841

  The Age of the Horse review: Susanna Forrest's canter through equine mysteries

  Jonathan Green

  There is something mysterious in the relationship between humans and the horse. The closer we come to them, the more intricate that partnership between our guiding intelligence and their apparently willing minds and flesh becomes, the more it seems strangely unknowable.

  Why does the horse co-operate? Why does this animal bred to startle then flee from danger with every powerful fibre of its 750 or so kilos come quietly to me when I walk towards it in the paddock? Why does he let me sit a saddle on his back, then lower his head obligingly as I slip the crown of a bridle over his ears and ease a bit between his teeth to nestle on his gums?
  A study of the horse and the human: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest.
  A study of the horse and the human: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest. Photo: Supplied

  Why do horses race, pull, pirouette, charge boldly and stand guard? What aspect of their inscrutable intelligence sees value in this ancient bargain: a sacrifice of wild freedom, in an exchange of effort and obedience for comfort, care and food?

  This mystery is a quiet subtext through the pages of Susanna Forrest's The Age of the Horse, though it remains, as it must, never quite resolved, a profundity never really tackled head on. It's a thing left hanging, as it is when Forrest quotes French naturalist the Comte du Buffon's ripely paradoxical description of the horse "the most noble conquest of mankind".

  All that said, Forrest quite early in this deft and sometimes lyrical work does give a simple answer to the other great equine question: why the long face? As she puts it: "Their heads were long so that they could graze with their eyes above the level of that vast expanse of herbage and see what was approaching them". And there you have it.

  Forrest begins with a study of the horse's early wildness, evolution and domestication, though, as she says in her first words, "this is not a history of the horse". No: it is a ramble through half a dozen intersecting "bridle roads", peregrinations that piece a patchwork view of horse and human interaction.

  From the pursuit of the vanishing and untameable tarpan, to the Hermes-tacked riding schools of modern, hyper-prosperous China, via the mirror-strewn menage of Versailles, and alternative farming movements aiming to return the plough horse to its yoke, Forrest observes and details a series of elaborate equine vignettes.

  She's there in person, a keen observer on what seems a long and complex personal quest … perhaps her own pursuit for clues to unlock that fundamental equine mystery? The book has the feel of episodic documentary television: discrete, self-contained explorations that taken together begin to meld into a rich pattern of well-researched, thoughtful detail. And some of it is extraordinary.
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  Imagine the scene, if not the olfactory stable tang, at Versailles. "Under Louis XV, great-grandson of the Sun King, the two stables held 1700 horses – 785 of whom lived in the Grande Ecurie – tended by over 2000 men."

  Forrest's quest here is complex and extensive, a mirror of the many ways in which horse and human have crossed and shared paths through geography and time, for good and for ill. From the Nazi quest to secure the last of the tarpan, to the horse-based therapy program for US veterans at Fort Myer, Arlington, and on the horsemeat pipeline that slaughters America's unwanted, tired and injured nags for the pet and human butcheries of Mexico and Canada.

  It's a fascinating, lucid and sometimes elegantly literary book, that hints gently at the great wonder of this ancient coupling of two mammal species.

  No more so than here: "Perhaps the strangest and most poignant story is that of the Household Cavalry horses that fought at Waterloo and were subsequently cashiered out of service at auction. The king's surgeon, Sir Astley Cooper, purchased 12 of the most wounded and had them taken to his home."

  Slowly the old warhorses recovered.

  "One morning looking across his land the surgeon saw the 12 horses form a line, shoulder to shoulder, then, without a cue, charge forward at a gallop. After a few strides they spun and retreated as formally as in a drill, and then broke from their line and careered about freely in high spirits."

  They did the same each morning.

  Maybe it's a slightly unfair reservation, but The Age of the Horse still left me wondering "why?".

  Jonathan Green is the editor of Meanjin.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/the-age-of-the-horse-an-equine-journey-through-human-history
  Word count: 857

  The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History

  By Susanna Forrest Atlantic Monthly Press 432 pp.

  Reviewed by Gretchen Lida
  July 9, 2017

  This marvel of a book reveals an ancient man-animal relationship in all its complexities.

  There are few horse books truly worth reading. Most are formulaic and lazy in both plot and form because authors and publishers know that the cult-like obsession with hooved subjects will sell books regardless. Usually, readers must trip over equine-language go-to’s like “majestic,” “wild,” and “spirited,” and, of course, the biggest eye-roller of all, “two hearts beating as one.”

  As an equestrian, I still scarf down such writing despite the clichés. I will share books with my fellow inmates of the Asylum Equus as long as the books fill the long hours of commuting, day jobs, miserable weather, and life circumstances that prevent us from spending time among our four-legged obsessions.

  But it’s rare that I can recommend horse books that are more than just interesting morsels of history, fantasy, or commentary. Finding a literary horse book, one that is both substantial and presents a staggering use of language, is an impossible task akin to finding a 6-year-old, well-trained, sensible gelding for a reasonable price.

  Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse is just such a miracle, and it is by far one of the best books I’ve read in 2017.

  The Age of the Horse is a collection of equestrian topics compiled in neat sections. Each includes detailed contemporary examples, delves into the history of the subject at hand, and provides careful analysis of the topic’s connections and implications.

  Sometimes Forrest sheds interesting and complex light on common subjects such as horse training or the uses of horses as therapy animals. Other times, she takes out a shovel and opens up the graves of things we horse people are too squeamish to address.

  Forrest is the brave one who helps us look at horses as a reflection of our relationship with money, or power, or food, or even each other. No matter the equestrian topic, her work makes webs of complexity that will keep readers turning pages.

  One darling topic of the horse world is the reintroduction of the Takhi, a Mongolian species and the only wild horse left in existence. Most of the recent writing on the horse's reintroduction covers either the struggles of maintaining the herds in Mongolia or the history of how the horses were able to return.

  Forrest, however, takes a different approach. She doesn’t just tell us what Mongolia does for the Takhi, but what the Takhi has done for Mongolia. The Takhi has become an emblem for a country that is changing as rapidly as a summer storm across the steppe.

  Forrest had the same care for even the thorniest of topics in equestrian circles: horse meat. Trying to summarize this section would take up this entire review, but it would also be an injustice to the beauty of the section itself. Instead, I can confidently say that I know the topic of horse meat causes fistfights even between friends in jodhpurs or Stetsons, but Forrest’s delicate clarity will help her readers understand the subject and decide for themselves.

  In the horse-meat section, she describes coming to the slaughter facility and seeing the horses in front of her:

  “A is a racer, a show horse, a mustang, a mistake, a dobbin, a wild hope, a cherished drop of DNA, a farm labourer, and then he changes, becomes a trail horse, a therapy horse, a disappointment, a buggy horse, a saved horse, a lawn ornament, a pet, a parcel of renderings. As they travel through the economic sorting machine, some horses lose what little ID they have — their breed certificates, their names, their histories. They often arrive at their destination blank.”

  Prose this beautiful peppers the entire book. As a writer and narrator, Forrest’s passion rings true on each page, yet her bias seldom appears, and the reader is never quite sure what her exact feelings are on her equine subjects and the humans they impact.

  This would be a failing in most books, but in this one, it is a marvel. Curiosity is the organizing principle of The Age of the Horse, and what a virtuous principle it is. I expect this book to be found dog-eared in schooling barns and pristinely kept on the shelves of writing professors. It is a triumph, and one to be enjoyed by anyone looking for a good read.

  Gretchen Lida is an essayist and equestrian. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Earth Island Journal, Horse Network, and many other publications. She is currently seeking a publisher for her book, Beware the Horse Girl: Essays for the Awkward Equestrian. Follow her on Twitter at @GC_LidaGretchen.
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• The Times Literary Supplement
  https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/horses-tale/
  Word count: 1456

  Horses’ tale
  CANDIDA BAKER

  Of all the stories in Susanna Forrest’s book The Age of the Horse: An equine journey through human history, the vignette that, perhaps, lingers most in the memory takes only a page or two to tell. Yet in many ways it defines the infinitely complex relationship that exists between man and the genus Equus. It involves mankind’s continuing attempts to domesticate one of the breeds of pure wild horse, the Tarpan, once common in the Ukraine. By the 1870s, Tarpan numbers had dwindled almost to the point of no return when a lone mare was spotted by the herdsmen on the Rachmanov Steppe, coming closer and closer to their herd of domestic horses, presumably for company. The mare mated with the herd’s stallion and went on to bear two foals. One day she followed them into a landowner’s stable. His men, realizing her value, rushed in to separate her from the other horses, and the ensuing fight was so brutal that she lost an eye. She raged, according to Forrest, trying to climb out of the box they shut her in, striking at them whenever they came near. Locked into the stable, she settled enough to give birth to a third foal, but when the spring came and the horses were let loose to graze, she fled, leaving her foal behind. In the autumn she was seen again by the local horsemen – an elusive apparition, appearing and disappearing in the surrounding landscape. Deciding to test their horses against her they set out to capture her, driving her from one horseman and mount to the next – but she outran them all, until, leaping a snowbank she stumbled in a hidden runnel, and broke a leg. They hauled her on a sleigh to the local village, where they planned to make a false leg for her, but she died some days later – the last of the known pure Tarpans. In that story lies the kind of emotive kernel that has drawn millions of readers – and not only horse-loving ones – to books such as Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka and The Silver Brumby, albeit without the happy ending that fiction writers can bestow on their equine characters.

  Forrest has carved out an unusual place for herself as a chronicler of all things equine. Last year, she won the Sophie Coe Prize for food writing for her essay “‘Horsemeat is Certainly Delicious’: Anxiety, xenophobia and rationalism at a nineteenth-century American hippophagic banquet”, which traces evolving attitudes to eating horse from neolithic Europe and Asia to twentieth-century New York; she is also the author of If Wishes Were Horses: A memoir of equine obsession (2012). In the latest book she brings her eye for detail and story-telling abilities to an extensively researched, fascinating history, covering subjects as diverse as the increasing popularity of equine therapy programmes, the return to horse-powered farming in some American communities, the Tahki of Mongolia and their highly prized speedy ponies, and the particularities of breeding Shire horses. Perhaps because of the ground the book attempts to cover, things get off to a slightly shaky start. There is a staccato quality to the sentences and a somewhat stilted edge to the prose in the first few chapters, as though the author were struggling to find her stride. But as the book progresses, Forrest’s passionate interest in her subject engages and we readily follow her as she travels to America, and through much of mainland Europe, Britain and China.

  Forrest has spent time with many people who have sought to understand how a horse thinks, including Lucy Rees, the author of the classic The Horse’s Mind (1984). Rees left her job as a neurophysiologist because she was disturbed by the medical stance on animal experimentation. She moved from London to live in the mountains of North Wales and, after her own experiences with horses, which included rehabilitating a neurotic Lipizzaner stallion into a calm trail-riding horse, Rees became fascinated with wild horses. She was surprised to discover that, rather than the hierarchical structure generally understood to be operating in any herd, horse groups in fact work under three rules: cohesion, space and synchrony. The interview with Rees is one of the highlights of the book – it illustrated what I have observed myself over decades of riding, rescuing, breeding and “starting” horses – that horses, if allowed, travel and graze in a constant ebb and flow; there is a hardly perceptible collective orchestration to their movements that we don’t notice until we look closely. A no doubt connected fact, according to Rees, is that, to a horse, company is essential. A lonely horse, concludes Forrest, and all sentient horse owners will concur, is an unhappy horse; and as the story of the last known Tarpan shows, a solitary horse will seek its place among others of its kind.
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  Forrest traverses the written history of the horse, dove-tailing it neatly with her physical travels in the modern-day horse world. In America, she was surprised to find that, in part thanks to the Amish and their insistence on traditional farming methods, British heavy horses such as the Suffolk Punch are as much in demand there as they are in decline in the UK. At a Horse Progress Day in Holmes County, Ohio, she meets a farmer, Jason Rutledge, who exclusively uses heavy horses for his farming needs. “It’s disrespectful to throw away thousands of years of expertise for seventy-five years of fossil fuel”, Rutledge says. “I don’t work with horses because I want to go back to the past, I’m doing it because we must preserve this as a valid tool in the toolbox of humanity for the future.” Rutledge, Forrest discovers, is far from alone. There are small communities throughout the US committed to a sustainable, organic and solar-powered future in which the horse has a permanent and vital role.

  Also in the US she spends time with battle-scarred veterans at a centre where horses are used to help returned soldiers to overcome PTSD – and, at the other end of the spectrum, she visits China to witness the growth of the luxury horse market for the very wealthy, where horses live in air-conditioned stables with piped music. We learn, too, of circus trick riders and the eighteenth-century theatrical spectaculars known as “carrousels”, as Forrest takes us through the seemingly endless possibilities of horse–human relationships. She does not, however, shy away from the darker aspects of the horse industry, confronting the vexed question of horse abattoirs in the US (the enforced closure of all but a few has simply meant that thousands of horses a day are trucked across the border to Canada), and the European horsemeat scandal of 2013. The question left hanging is, in a sense, unanswerable – what is a horse’s life worth?

  Perhaps I am showing an Antipodean sensibility, but the book’s title seems somewhat misleading: it suggests an all-encompassing account that the volume surely cannot pretend to deliver a journey through human history when horse-proud countries such as Australia and New Zealand, Iceland, Dubai, Finland and Ireland, to name but a few, are missing from the story. The contributions of Australia and New Zealand to the First World War in horseflesh alone is staggering. 136,000 “Walers” – so-called because, although the horses came from all parts of Australia, they were originally sold through New South Wales – were sent to join the war effort; they were sturdy, hardy horses, able to travel long distances in hot weather with little water. One horse made it back to Australia – Sandy, the personal mount of Major General Sir William Bridges, who died at Gallipoli. At the end of the war, 13,000 horses were “surplus to needs”; of those, 11,000 were sent as remounts – mainly to the British army in India – and the others were destroyed. The ANZAC mounted division formed in Egypt in 1916, and of the 18,000 horses New Zealand contributed, four returned home. In the end, of course, an author has to make choices about what to include, and what to leave out, and Susanna Forrest rightly talks about the work as an “unmapped territory of branching carriles that intersected in impossible complexity”. She would, she decided, trace her own paths among them, and her passion for the horse leaps from the pages of a book that is a rich fount of knowledge for anyone interested in the innumerable and endlessly fascinating points where horse and human meet.
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• Horse Addict
  https://horseaddict.net/2018/01/04/book-review-the-age-of-the-horse-susanna-forrest/
  Word count: 722

  Susanna Forrest’s book “The Age of the Horse. An Equine Journey through Human History ” takes us through the history of man’s relationship with the horse. She divides the book up into eight chapters, each chapter dealing with a different aspect of the horse and its shared history with humans.

  EVOLUTION This is a very short chapter that briefly outlines the evolution of the horse from the ‘zero horse’ 56 million years ago to the Equus caballus of more modern times.
  DOMESTICATION This is another short chapter on the evidence that has been found of horses and humans in the Copper Age.
  WILDNESS This chapter follows the history of wild horses and domestic horses across Europe. It also includes Forrest’s trip to Mongolia to observe the Takhi horses in the wild. I could have done with less travelogue from Forrest about the travel experience in Mongolia and more about the Takhi. She does give some interesting history about their place in Mongolian history and how they have been returned to the wild.
  CULTURE This chapter focuses on the history and development of the horse in theatrical presentations and hippodrama as well as modern presentations in Versailles.
  POWER I found this a very interesting chapter. Forrest gives us a fascinating bit of history of the heavy horse being imported into India as a gift to Ranjit Singh, the first Maharajah of the Punjab, from the British King, William IV, in 1831. This chapter goes on to give us a detailed look into a 24 hour period in London in the days when horses were the only source of transport: cab horses, vanners, carriage horses, coal horses, Shires and Clydesdales. The chapter finishes with a detailed look at the heavy horses used in agricultural work in the modern world and a movement gaining strength in the USA to use the work horse as an alternative to machines.
  MEAT This is a difficult chapter for anyone who cares about horses. In the USA there are no more slaughter houses so horses are transported for slaughter to Canada or Mexico. It is grim and disheartening as this is the side of humans’ relationship with horses that reveals the lack of respect with which horses are still treated today. There is and always will be a market for horsemeat. Forrest reveals the seamy side of how that horse meat is procured.
  WEALTH Forrest coins the term Equus luxuriosus for the horses that are the visible sign of wealth China. In China today one of the best ways you can show how wealthy you are is to have horses. Not just any horse but an expensive, imported, European, well bred , Warmblood horse.
  WAR Horses have a long history of being used in war by humans. Forest follows some of this history and then seems to get somewhat sidetracked into a recounting the bullfights in Portugal today. I could really have done without this. Especially her detailing the gore and dismemberment she saw on You Tube videos of these bullfights in which horses met a ghastly death. I am unclear how this relates to war but Forrest seems to think it does. This final chapter concludes with Forrest’s visit to the Caisson Platoon Equine Assisted Program or CPEAP. This program is proof of the value of horses as therapists to those wounded in body and mind by war. Forrest is very clear in expressing her opinion about how she feels the veterans of modern wars have been treated when they return home.It is in the Caisson Platoon program that Forrest can find the connecting line through all of her horse-human exploration.

  I found this to be a well researched book literally brimming with information. However I did find the format a bit disjointed. So for me it was not as enjoyable a read as I had hoped it would be. Nonetheless, that is just my personal taste, and this book is still well worth reading if you are interested in the history and development of horse human relationships.

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  Book reviewCaisson Platoon Equine Assisted ProgramHorse in historyHorse meatSusanna ForrestTakhi horseThe Age of the Horse
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