Horses of the World by ÉLISE ROUSSEAU, Translated by TERESA LAVENDER FAGAN

Princeston (2017) RRP $ 39.95 Hardback

THERE IS something for every horse lover in this beautifully illustrated overview of 567 domestic and wild breeds, each of which is accompanied by superb colour drawings. It is organised along geographical lines with each account providing the horse breed’s height and weight, distribution, origins, history, character, attributes and uses. As domestic animals, all the horses here have been bred to meet the needs of the people who bred them and, perhaps unsurprsingly, as our reliance on the horse gives way everywhere to machinery, the vast majority of breeds depicted in the book are very rare. Some will be gone in 10 years; others such as the Abaco Spanish Colonial Horse, are probably gone already. And, while the global population of some 58 million is shrinking slowly, the battle to save the rarest breeds is an urgent one.