Wild About Horses: Our Timeless Passion for the Horse

Patrick Colgan is the former executive director of the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

Wild About Horses is a blend of research, personal experience, and
unabashed love.

Scanlan’s fascination with horses is expressed through his discussion
of such topics as the evolution, general biology, domestication, and
intelligence of horses; the role of the horse in religions, myths, and
ceremonies; the military use of horses (these stark and ghastly accounts
emphasize the asymmetry of the human/horse arrangement); the horse with
respect to Native culture, mustangs, and ranchers; and the treatment of
the horse in literature and popular culture. The horse personalities
described range from Alexander’s Bucephalus to racehorses such as
Northern Dancer and Secretariat; the human personalities run the gamut
from warriors to cappuccino cowboys.

Conversational in style and uneven in content, this book combines a
mixture of fable and history reminiscent of Pliny, zooarcheology, social
anthropology, tall tales, and Scanlan’s own adventures and opinions.
Recommended for animal lovers.