Farewell to the Horse
Allen Lane 464pp £25 The Week Bookshop £22 (incl. p&p)
For several millennia before the Industrial Revolution, horses were “at the heart of human history”, said Jane Shilling in The Mail on Sunday. Their speed and endurance were the foundations on which most “technological advances rested”. Warfare, food production, transport and communications: “all ran on horsepower”. But as the German historian Ulrich Raulff shows in Farewell to the Horse, the advent of mechanisation gradually brought an end to this “special relationship”. Somewhere between Napoleon and the First World War, Raulff writes, horses stopped being “man’s chief zoological partner in the making of history” and became, instead, a “recreational item, a mode of therapy, a status symbol, and a source of pastoral support for female puberty”. In this “witty” and “richly textured” history, Raulff avoids romanticising the past: as he shows, most working horses led “wretched lives”, and an estimated eight million died in WWI alone.
Within a few paragraphs of starting this book, it becomes clear that you have never read anything quite like it, said Kate Kellaway in The Observer. Raulff is a “one-off” with an “extraordinarily connective mind”. He ranges “at a lick” across a vast terrain, from the sexual symbolism of horses in 19th century novels to the fact that the first cowboys in America were Jewish. At times, it does feel as if Raulff is simply “rifling through history for horse-related anecdotes”, said James Mcconnachie in The Sunday Times. Some sections lack a clear “narrative line”. And yet his “horse’s-eye view” opens up some “extraordinarily fresh historical vistas”. He examines, for example, the different ways in which dictators related to horses: Napoleon was famed for his riding prowess, while the “animal lover” Hitler “hated” them. In Manhattan in 1900, he tells us, 130,000 horses worked in the city, producing 1,100 tonnes of manure each day. This is a “heroic exercise in reimagining a lost world”.
Farewell to the Horse is full of “provocative” ideas, said Melanie Reid in The Times. Horses, Raulff contends, have given humanity “three gigantic gifts: energy, knowledge and pathos” (animal rights began with a concern for mistreated horses). For teenage girls, he suggests, horses are a “kind of living metaphor”, a “safe cargo ship to carry a girl’s libido to the shores of heterosexual sexual attachment”. Yet beware: this “seriously intellectual” book can be “hard work”. And at more than 450 pages, it may be a bit too much for “the average horsey Brit”.