Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the form and evolution of the horse hoof, as well as related adaptations. (originally published 06/13/2023)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's Saturday. It's time for a vault episode and this is going to be Hoof's Part two, which originally published six thirteen, twenty twenty three.
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the horse hoof. Now. In part one, we discussed the anatomical form of the horse hoof, with an emphasis on the alarming fact that the hoof is essentially a highly specialized form of the tetrapod middle finger. So when you see a horse galloping around, yes, it is running around on all middle fingers and toes. We talked about an ancient legend about the horse ridden by Julius Caesar, which some artists have depicted as having dock in hair and human feet instead of hoofs, at least on the first two legs. Rob's idea, I think was that this it's possible that these stories could be based on observations of what are called polydactyl horses, horses born with extra hooflets on the sides of the primary hoof, which do in fact exist.
Yeah, this seems to be the more sensible interpretation that you see taken by folks. And I don't think anyone's actually arguing that these horses had like human fore feet, but it looks hilarious in the illustrations.
It does. And we finally talked about the evolution of the horse hoof, with the commonly accepted narrative being that millions of years ago, the ancestors of modern horses lived in more forested environments, maybe warmer, wetter environments. They were much smaller, maybe about the size of dogs, and had multiple toes per feet. Then, due to climate and habitat changes, they became grassland dwellers, which drove them to evolve larger body sizes and select for galloping speed, and these changes coincided with the loss of peripheral toes until you end up with the modern horse and its relatives in the genus equis, so that would include the zebra and the ass all having only one toe per foot, the columnar hoof. Now today, we wanted to continue the series on the horse hoof getting into a couple other things, about horsecof evolution as well as the invention of the horseshoe. But before we do that, I wanted to take a brief detour into a metaphorical connection to the hoof, which concerns medical diagnostics and more generally, the realm of statistical reasoning. So there's a famous aphorism widely used in medical education, often invoked by practicing physicians, and it goes like this, when you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras. Rob. I think this thing may have come up on the show in the past that I couldn't remember when, but I'm sure you've heard this before, right.
Yeah, yeah, And it basically is what it sounds like, right, it's, you know, whatever the evidence seems to indicate, go for the more likely and more statistically reasonable explanation for.
The evidence, right. So I was looking up the history of this quote in a chapter on medical aphorisms in a book called White Coat Tails Medicine's Heroes, Heritage and Misadventures by Robert B. Taylor published by Springer. So I'll refer back to that chapter in a second. But yeah, Rob, like you say, the point of this aphorism is that when a patient presents with symptoms X, Y, and Z, you should start by thinking about the most common conditions within the population associated with that club of symptoms, rather than jumping to assumptions about rare diseases. So, for example, if a patient presents at a US clinic with flu like symptoms, it's better to start by investigating the possibility that they have the flu or common cold, or now maybe COVID, rather than to start by investigating whether they have contracted the hindra virus from a flying fox in Australia. Taylor traces this saying back to an American medical researcher named Theodore E. Woodward who lived nineteen fourteen to two thousand and five, who taught at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And it seems actually the common form of this aphorism might be a paraphrase, and the more accurate original quote may have been don't look for zebras on Green Street. That might be a little perplexing, but it makes sense in the context because Green Street was the location of the University of Maryland hospital in Baltimore, and he was teaching at the University of Maryland to students there, so of course you can see why it would need to be rephrased to make more sense outside of its original locality. But I also think the localization to Baltimore geography highlights something important, which is that this aphorism is only useful when you're talking about a known population of patients in which the frequency of certain diseases or conditions is fairly well understood. Because if you were talking to a group of medical students, maybe in a region of southern Africa where zebras are abundant, it might make sense to use the aphorism inverted, I guess, depending on how many horses there are around as well. But in the same sense, you have to know what the frequencies are in the population you're looking at before deploying this.
Yeah, that's true.
Now, I find this the reasoning behind the saying actually kind of interesting, because if you interpret it in the usual way, it's a piece of advice that can seem rather obvious, like common explanations are more common than rare way ones. But I think as a general rule, when looking for explanations, we do have to be reminded to start by considering what is most likely in terms of frequency, because there are all kinds of mental biases that constantly tempt us to start looking for highly unusual causes for unexplained phenomena before we've exhausted all of the extremely commonplace candidates for one thing. Unusual causes and explanations are usually more exciting. They kind of stick in the mind because of our level of interest in them, and they can quite easily then come to mind when we start searching around for an explanation. They're sort of at the top of the toy box right now. In this section of the book I was talking about, Taylor makes an interesting point about the zebra aphorism, which I hadn't quite considered. I was just thinking at the first order level of more common explanations and less common explanations. But Taylor also writes quote as a clinical corollary, experienced diagnosticians look first for uncommon manifestations of common conditions rather than common manifestations of uncommon diseases. Now that seemed really interesting to me. I hadn't quite thought about it that way. And of course it would depend on exactly how uncommon you mean in each clause of that sentence, Like if you were to represent them as actual percentage chances and stuff. The math might break out in different ways. But if a certain set of symptoms appears in I don't know, only three percent of cases of an extremely common condition that affects you know, millions of people every year, it is probably still worth investigating that diagnosis the uncommon manifestation of the extremely common condition before you look at the possibility of a condition that matches the symptoms very closely. But you know, you might only see all a couple of cases in the world per year, it's extremely rare. You'd still get way more hits of confirmation on the on the uncommon version of the common condition.
It reminds me of various discussions we've had about cryptozoology and the interpretations and misinterpretations of dead animals and in some cases dead human beings, where you're looking at some rate of decay and yeah, are you looking at it as the as an uncommon manifestation of a common condition, and in other words, are you're looking at as kind of like a novel pattern or appearance in decay of just a normal, mundane animal, or are you going to jump to the to that extreme level and think, well, no, this is just how it looks and we've just never seen this creature before.
Yeah. Yeah. However, I want to come back on the other end, because if you search for medical case reports citing this aphorism, which I was doing a lot of times, it will be specific to discuss cases where it was a zebra on Green Street, the rare and unexpected diagnosis that turned out to be correct. So just one example I was looking at this was a case report published in Clinical Practice in Cases in Emergency Medicine in twenty nineteen by Loupez at All called Beware of the Zebra, nine year Old with Fever. I believe this incident took place in the US state of North Carolina. So it was a nine year old girl whose family spoke only French, and they presented at the hospital with the patient having an abdominal pain, vomiting, intermittent fevers, fatigue, and headache, and because there was a language barrier, everything had to be done with the help of an interpreter, and it seems that this led to some maybe some original misunderstandings about the case history. So the doctors tried to diagnose based on all the normal explanations that they would be likely to see in their patient population, but none of the common diagnoses really fit her case. Her condition continued to get worse. It even became life threatening, and the breakthrough seemed to come when the doctors began looking outside the normal slate of conditions encountered in their practice in the United States. Finally, they learned that the girl's family had just in the weeks before, arrived from the Congo, where malaria is common. The care providers eventually ordered a test that would put them on the right track. They write in their report, quote, this test was a peripheral blood smear, specifically a thick and thin smear, which revealed Plasmodium falciparum, and this is one of the protozoa responsible for causing malaria, leading to a final diagnosis of cerebral malaria. And then they write from here they contacted the twenty four hour CDC hotline to immediately get the appropriate anti malarial medication. They put the girl on a quinine drip and admitted her to the pediatric intensive care unit. And then they say, quote remarkably, within four weeks, she made a full recovery and returned home with her family. So thankfully, the patient was all right in the end, but she potentially could have died if doctors hadn't made the locally unusual but correct diagnosis and given her the right treatment. And so the authors say in their conclusion quote, many of us are taught the common aphorism in medical school. When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. When approaching a nine year old with fever, we hear the hoof beat symptoms and tend to think of the typical diagnoses that are commonly seen in our pediatric population. Yet if we are not thinking about the zebras, we will miss this common presentation of a disease that is uncommon north of the equator, which could lead to high morbidity and possibly even mortality for patients. So it's very good that they were able to discover this intervene and probably save the girl's life. But it highlights how there's a difficult balance, Like if you go looking for zebras before you look for horses on Green Street, you will waste a lot of time and resources and potentially cause frequent misdiagnoses that could harm people. But if you never consider the possibility of zebra's on Green Street. There will be rare but very real cases where you could save somebody's life but you don't.
Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, certainly looking at the like the professional end of the scenario, because on the other end, like say the user end and the media end, I mean, zebra on Green Street. That's a great headline. You're gonna that's the headline that's gonna stick in your mind, and then when you're going to see the doctor, you're gonna be like, hey, doc, is it possible that a rare amiba is eating my flesh? Or something to that effect, because that's what you saw in the headline, that's what you saw on the the documentary series that that that sensationalized a rare case, right.
I Mean. The the difficult thing is like, because of the way we emotionally react to stories like this, I feel like it kind of tends to have the effect of making us think, well, maybe then I should start looking for diagnoses of unusual diseases in patient populations. So it just highlights like diagnosis in the specific case of medicine, and searching for explanations for unknown phenomena generally is really difficult. It involves a balance between prioritizing likely explanations, which are by very definition almost always going to be correct, but also being open minded enough to catch the unusual ones when they arise. And obviously, I think a big part of the art of medicine is gaining good intuition and establishing sound processes to prioritize explanations in a reasonable way based on what we know about frequency, but then also to be able to catch the cases that are unusual and intervene appropriately to help people. All right, you want to talk a little bit about the evolution of the horse hoof?
Yeah, yeah, we should probably talk a little bit more about how they came to run about in their middle fingers.
We talked in the last episode about a pretty commonly accepted story of how that evolutionary process occurred, but there was still some uncertainty about exactly why the one toe making contact with the ground is favored over keeping the larger number of toes that the ancestors of horses used to have, And to some degree I think that question is still not fully settled. There are still some questions about why exactly the one toe was favored. We do know that the ancestors of horses and zebras and asses had multiple toes per foot. But what is gained by going quad bird? You know, the middle fingers across all four feet, So the evolution of is called monodactyly, having one toe monodactyly. It has long been assumed that that was useful for allowing a large animal like a modern horse, to achieve greater running speed. But I came across an interesting alternative idea explored in a paper called the Evolution of equid monodactyly, a review including a new hypothesis published in Frontiers and Ecology and Evolution by Christine M. Janis and Raymond Bernor, and basically here the authors asked what if the evolution of the modern equine hoof was a product of selection for endurance rather than speed, meaning that the primary advantage conferred was in the evolution of an efficient and energy efficient spring foot that would support long distance trots at medium speed to locate better food resources. So, under their hypothesis, the law of extra toes may have been a coincidental byproduct of the selection for the more efficient spring foot, which helps the horse conserve energy while foraging, rather than an adaptation for top speed. Running, which again is assumed to be primarily for the purpose of escaping the jaws of predators. Now I cite this not to say that I think their hypothesis is definitely correct. I have no expertise to decide between which explanation of the horsfof evolution better fits the evidence, but this possibility made me think back again to the Zebras on Green Street saying about how sometimes certain explanations seem more likely to us not because they're actually more common, but because they're more mentally salient. It reminds me I've talked before about this idea that I have the sort of sex and violence principle in evolutionary reasoning, where what I think I've observed is that when people without or sometimes even with biological training, are trying to think of possible evolutionary explanations for a trait in an organism, we are a little too quick to resort to explanations involving either predation or mating, and we often overlook extremely common mechanisms in nature, like temperature regulation and energy efficiency, which play a huge role in the success of a life form. But I think maybe they're not as interesting to our brains as sex or violence, so we're less likely to think of them. They do not bleed, so they do not lead in the mind.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of past discussions we've talked about concerning the stegosaurus, for example, you know, and memory serves you know that there have been various interpretations over the years, for there are those curious plates on their back, as well as very interpretations of just how they are positioned. But yeah, you can with something like that, you can. You're inevitably you're going to find those explanations that have to do with mating, or protection from predators, or protection when they're in conflict with others of their kind. But yeah, I guess sometimes these ideas that they're used for temperature regulation or something like that may feel less exciting. May it may feel more mundane. Though I guess you could also argue that maybe the more exotic or mysterious the feature is, like say those backridges on the stegosaurus, maybe that cancels it out to some degree.
I don't know, but.
It's hard to imagine a like a seven year old or an eight year old playing with the toy stegosaurus and be like, look, mom and dad, this guy's warming up in the sun watching. That's not what bathtub dinosaurs do. They bite each other.
But again I want to make clear I'm not saying I think that the trotting foraging spring hook explanation is necessarily better than the high speed running explanation for the horse. I don't know, but I think it's important to remember to consider those types of explanations as well. Now, another question that has come up in several things I was reading is about should we really say that the horse only has one toe? I mean, it really does basically have only one toe that makes contact with the ground, But in what sense did it really quote lose the other toes. One example of this counter narrative I was reading is in an article in The New York Times by Veronique Greenwood published February eighth, twenty twenty, called a horse has five toes and then it doesn't. And this article tells the story of a researcher named Catherine Kavanaugh, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, who was looking at preserved horse embryos in the lab when she discovered something very interesting, which is that during the earliest stages of gestation, the area of the embryo that will eventually develop to become the foot become the hoof in that area. The embryonic horses have five toes, so this period during development only lasts for a couple of days before the extra toes begin to sort of fuse and vanish. But to read from the article briefly quote, the discovery implies something profound about how anatomical development works. As an embryo puts itself together, growing from a tiny wad of cells into multiple specialized tissues, fed by blood vessels and linked by the winding threads of nerves, it is following a template. That template is subject to evolution, just like other things about the animal. But some moments in the process or some routes that development takes may not easily be altered, And so the researcher here, Catherine Kavanaugh, is quoted saying something about the early steps in toe development is stabilized. We don't know why, but that's what we think is going on. So I found it's also interesting because it's an example of how stages in development can become evolutionarily fixed even when they differ from the final form. So like for some reason, as the horse is growing as an embryo, it needs to develop five fingers before or five toes before it can lose four of the toes per hoof, so you know, eventually it will have functionally one toe making contact with the ground, but the development process has to go through this other stage first.
For some reason, it reminds me of something we discussed in our whale episodes about the blowhole of the whale being seen to, of course, through the fossil record, travel up the snout up to the top of the head, but we can also observe this movement in the womb as the fetal whale is developing.
Yeah. Another interesting thing about the horse hoof is that there are some people who have pointed out how vestiges of the missing toes can still sort of be found as little sort of ridges on the sides of the hoof. Yeah.
I ran across this a lot in some of the veterinary sources I was looking at.
But don't let this take away from your mental enjoyment of thinking about the horses running around on its middle fingers, which it functionally is it is, I.
Mean to me, it makes it even more weird. It's kind of like if you were to It's kind of like if you're looking at Kermit the Frog and someone were to tell you, Like there's a difference in saying, hey, there's somebody's hand in there, and and someone saying, actually, all the bones of a human hand are present in Kermit the frog, but they have been repurposed and formed into the skeletal structure of this bipedal frog creature. Like that's even crazier, And I feel like that's more in line with what we know about the horses.
Splendid analogy, Bravo. All right, are we ready to talk about the horse shoe?
Yeah, this is something that originally I didn't think we were going to cover, or if we were to cover, we might come back, but I felt like it's kind of so closely linked to our understanding of the horse and the human use of the horse. And at the same time, in discussing this, we are going to be kind of blowing through the domestication of the horse rather quickly. Like this is a topic that has received a lot of attention over the years in varying fields. I mean, there's genetic research, there's archaeology, there's you know, various cultural inquiries. It's kind of all over the place, and there are a lot of unanswered questions about, you know, especially when you get into you know, the exact who's and wins and whares, say, horse domestication and even the development or the horseshoe. But I feel like covering the horseshoe also helps us understand the hoof a little bit more so, briefly talking about the modern horse, the modern horse has a long and pivotal history as a human steed. Many animals have, of course as mounts for human riders, and many have served as a pack and draft animals. I know that, at least on the artifact and perhaps elsewhere in some core episodes, we've touched on the importance of the camel and the donkey. But the horse, the horse is just a whole different matter, both in terms of the impact that it's had, like I think, the larger impact that it's had globally, and also just how it has captured the imagination. Not to diminish the camel or the donkey, because in particular regions, the camel and the donkey have been far more important. Whole books have been written about the camel and the donkey, and I've read parts of them. If you want to hear a little bit more about that, go back to the Monster Fact episode I did on Donkeys of Dune, which touched on this a little bit. Now, as we've discussed, the modern horse evolved over the course of fifty to sixty million years from a diminutive ancestor, and then it would have reached identifiable form somewhere around four to four point five years ago, then migrating across the Bearing Strait via some sort of a primitive land bridge into Eurasia about eleven thousand years ago, then becoming stinct in North America after that, and it would not come back around the globe to North America until it was reintroduced via European conquest in the fifteenth century seehe Now. Of the wild horse's three ancestors, two went extinct and a third the Takei or Mongolian wild horse or Preswalski's horse. These are all the different names for the same creature. Essentially, this survived only in captivity and then was subsequently has been subsequently reintroduced into the wild, though with some important caveats worth discussing. Should we come back around to talk about the reintroduction of a species. There are lots of sort of ups and downs with that particular story, as there are with some other species reintroduction tales. Now much has been written about the role of the horse in the history of human conflict, and there is indeed just so much much that we could and I guess should one day discuss about that. You know, the use of say, chariot technology, even the saddle like, they're just so many different angles to take now is pointed out by equine warfare expert and Highland, and this is in Brian and Fagin's The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World. DNA evidence suggests that the domestication of the horse took place independently in several different places and times. And according to them, and this was this book came out in two thousand and four, so I'm going to touch on a more recent source on all this in just a second. They were talking about the earliest domestication having possibly taken place on the Eurasian Step somewhere around four thousand BCE, though they did highlight that the proof was inconclusive. I've also seen other sources just put it that The geographic origin of horse domestication is simply an unknown, and there of course a handful of likely areas and times, based on different findings, spread across Eurasia, from as far west as Iberia to as far east as Siberia. Now more recently. The more recent source I was looking at on this though, was a twenty twenty one analysis of ancient horse DNA, and this seemed to narrow it down to the Eurasian step the Volga Dawn region, so that would seem to possibly be the strong contender for where the who. That's a little bit more complex, is pointed out by Amber Dance in a solid twenty twenty two article for Smithsonian Magazine titled When Did Humans Domesticate the Horse? The region was home to diverse peoples who may have engaged in horse domestication in the earliest time period. The win in all of this sounds like it was maybe four two hundred years ago, pushing us back to the twenty one hundred s BCE. Based on all of this, though, Dance also points out that quote clear evidence of horse domestication doesn't appear in the archaeological record until about five hundred years ago. That would push things back obviously now, as Highland and Fagan pointed out, stud records from twenty three hundred BC and what is now Iraq include data on donkeys, mules, and some horses. There are Sumerian proverbs that refer to horse riding during this time period. But yeah, like I say, this is a topic we could go on about at some length, but suffice to say that the evidence points to this general time period, but it has still long been a topic of dispute.
Now.
One thing that I liked in Dance's article is that they point out that horses were coexisting alongside human beings long before we were able to ride them or really do anything with them. They were around during the time of Stone Age human beings. They no doubt inspired Stone Age human beings and human populations. Our ancestors depicted them in their cave art, but it would have been a long time before they could figure out how to master these beasts and truly harness the power.
Of the horse. Yeah. I don't know if this is still the dominant view, but I recall reading years ago that many researchers thought that humans probably hunted horses for food before they domesticated them.
Yeah, that's that's what I saw indicated. And these sources I was looking at as well, you know, I mean, you see them from afar. They look cool, they looked really neat. Look at that those flowing manes. I mean, it's kind of interesting to think that some of the some of the impressions we have watching a horse running about with its kind, you know, across the field. You know, maybe we're feeling some of the same things our ancient ancestors would have felt, you know, these sort of deep down impressions, but with the added level of we probably don't think about maybe running them down with our spears and cooking them up later and making things out of them. Of course, this would have been This was how we interacted with pretty much everything in the natural world during that time period. And of course if we were going to hunt a horse, we would have to depend on human ingenuity, human strategy, human tool use, and eventually when humans figure out figured out how to truly harness the horse, they also had to employ various tools. So if anyone out there, if you're like me, most of your experience with horses is probably in video games where you break a wild horse or train a wild horse by doing something like I don't know, whistling at it, or you know, you jump up on its back. I was asking my son, how do you get a horse? And Zelden He's like, oh, you just jump on its back and I don't know, you do something else and then you're good to go.
Yeah, Breath of the Wild is kind of a bucking Bronco thing. You jump on the horse and if you can hold on long enough while it's trying to kick you off, then it becomes your friend. There you go.
Yeah, then that's fine for video game, but a lot more complex. If you read any like serious westerns about breaking horses and so forth, you get into a little Cornett McCarthy, you're gonna you know, it's it's it's a longer process, a lot more more kicking, maybe a few more busted ribs in the process.
And so.
One thing that Hyland and Fagan point out is that as humans were mastering horses, they inevitably turned to bovine control mechanisms, so cows were domesticated much earlier. Humans had had much earlier figured out some of the ways that they could use tools and things they they built to control these large and powerful creatures, and they were able to adapt some of those for the domestication of the horse, and they evolved from there to include things like metal bits and harnesses, ultimately things like armor horse armor for battle, chariot technology, and of course things like the saddle and stirrup loops. But all of this discussion thus far has been in service of the horse hoof and of course the horseshoe. As we mentioned already in the previous episode on the horse hoof, the hoof, while certainly an amazing adaptation, is not indestructible, and the domestication of the horse took this creature out of its sort of normal environment in activities and placed it in those that suited us best, especially in the use of things like agriculture, travel, ultimately warfare, and at some point, and much like horse domestication itself, likely various points in various times in ancient history, humans who made use of the horse realize that hoofs require special care, and that this care could in fact be preventative care, so the hoof, like the human foot, could be protected and reinforced.
This is one of those things like drinking animal milk, that's the questions like who's the first person who tried to do this, You really got to wonder.
Yeah, and again this kind of gets into sort of the everyday nature of the horse and horse related technology. It just seems so common. You know, it's the stuff of westerns and fantasy shows, fantasy shows in which the horse is not the most fantastic element. You know, we're focusing on the dragon, but meanwhile, here's this animal running around on its on its single toes, and we have augmented this creature with various contraptions and straps and bits. And also we have we have nailed these these shoes. We call them a shoe, but you know, it's like it's like an iron loop onto the bottom of their their hoof walls in order to make them more capable of keeping up with what we need them to do. Technologically enhanced. Is the horse cyborgs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and in some respects now, there have been many different approaches to this over the ages, because again, like the Bay Sick, none of it is the realization that, oh man, we're rough on these horses. We should we're having to clean up and take care of them after we use them too hard. Let's try and protect that hoof a little bit, and there have been various ways to sort of address this again in different times.
In different places.
Some early examples from parts of Asia have been based in apparently in medicinal organic wrappings to treat injuries. So you're working your horse too hard, the horse is suffering various injuries or ailments of the hoof, so you start wrapping it up in things to protect it and to heal it. And then it seems to be a case of treatment becoming preventative, where it's realized, oh, you know, let's just keep something wrapped around the hoof or at least when we're using the horse, or at least in certain environmental circumstances, and that can help make the hoof last longer.
That's interesting.
Then there's this whole area of early hoof boots. Now these are not to be confused with the hoof boots. Humans make and wear themselves so that their own feet can look like hooves. If you're not familiar with these, treat yourself, go do an image search. A lot of them are cloven hoofs for like sador costumes, but other times they are horse hooves for horse related dress.
When you i didn't realize at first. You meant like that these were for costumes or recreational I was like, what is the functional reason to make your foot into a hoof?
To be a satyr or to be a horsey? And you find that, you know, some of them are very goth looking, some of them more and more on the furry end of the spectrum. But yeah, I saw some of these recently at a at a Renaissance festival that I went to with my family. There's a sadar guy over there walking around on hoof boots.
Man, you think being in high heels for a long time is rough? It turn your foot into a hoof.
I know it. It looks, it looks unpleasant, I mean, but I guess it's like really awesome high heels, right, I mean, nobody's wearing those for comfort. You're wearing them to look cool. And the same goes for those those weird goat boots you might be wearing to the renfest. All right, So what we're talking about here not those sorts of hoof boots. These are basically different approaches where you would take like essentially like a leather sheath for the hoof, sometimes augmented with metal studs on the bottom, essentially making you know, you think about basically the same sort of adaptations you would make to a human boot. You know, well, it's like wrap that, let's wrap that foot up in leather. Or it's a little slippery, let's put some studs on the bottom of that so it doesn't slip around. And it's also worth noting that modern hoof boots exist as horseshoe alternatives. You see a lot of this, particularly in the realm of natural horsemanship, sort of like modern backing away from some of the the aspects of horsemanship that might be considered a little bit too rough or unnecessarily rough, especially for what we might be asking of our horses in the modern age, and so you might see a hoof boot, which in many of these cases they look like like little like sports shoes for a horse. They can slip those on, and I'm to understand that also sometimes they're used in addition to a normal horseshoe. Equestrians out there listening to the episode, if you have some thoughts on hoofboots right in, we would love to see them. Same goes for people who just like dressing like satyrs. We also want to see your hoof boots. Nobody needs to feel left out. But then there's also the hippo sandal, and this is exactly what it sounds like. It is a sandal of sorts for horse hooves. These were especially common in the northwestern Roman Empire and it was I think largely a temporary solution. So the idea is, this is not something that was nailed on. It was something that was strapped on, and if you look at examples, it looks like basically like a strap on horse hoof. You can see that like these were generally made out of iron. They would cover the bottom of the hoof wall and then you would strap it on, but it wasn't going to be on their long term. Once you got wherever you were riding to, or I don't know, after battle or whatever the scenario is, then it's time to take these hippo sandals off. And then eventually we get to the proper iron horseshoe, which everyone knows what this looks like because it exists in the public mind outside of mere equestrian interests, and even outside of its use on the horse, it has become an artifact of some significance across multiple cultures. It is this U shaped twist of iron that is actually nailed into place in the horse's hoof walls. The origin of this particular invention or artifact is also difficult to well nail down, if I guess you could say, with different possibilities emerging, I've read that the Gulls are thought to have possibly innovated this. Others have said the Celts may have done it, or being among the first to do it, and there's some evidence stemming from ancient grave sites. But one thing to keep in mind here is that initially you might think, oh, well, they're made out of iron, at least they're going to keep longer. But then we have to realize iron would have been precious, and therefore iron would often be reused or even re forged, thus robbing us of evidence in many cases of these particular artifacts. But it's possible that the use of iron horseshoes go back to perhaps four hundred BCE. But like a lot of this, the use of iron horseshoes is rather broadly difficult to define and nail down because their use often bumps up against and coexists with other forms of protecting the hoof. So you might have a period of time and a part of the world where some people are using a horseshoe, using the hippo sandal or some other innovation, or or indeed where there'll be a whole culture that's not using anything and they're depending on stage just switching out horses and find you know, realizing that they can't and shouldn't just run the horse to death. But they may realize, well, we just need to switch them out more, and this is going to be our approach to making the most out of a given hoof and making the hoofs and therefore the horse itself lasts longer for us. Now the horse shoe itself has a life all its own at this point outside of merely nailing it in place in the bottom of a horse's foot. As we've touched on a bit already, the horseshoe has long been seen as a good luck icon in many different cultures, in many different times, and it's only kind of interesting chase down like why this is? Like why did people start admiring the horseshoe and nailing it up and attracting some level of significance to it?
Very good question. I often find myself wondering about things like this, like how did a certain item or image come to have good magic or bad magic associated with it?
Yeah, yeah, So one of the first places I turned to for an answer on this is the book Magical House Protection by Brian Hoggard, a former guest on the show. I think it was on last October while you were on a parnal leave. But the book deals with various things that people have hidden away in their walls and under their floorboards throughout Europe, in the US predominantly, but also just throughout the world as a way of protecting the house from bad luck, evil spirits, and what have you. And Hoggard wrote that, yeah, you find horseshoes being associated with good luck throughout the British Isles, Europe, the United States quote, and it would seem the rest of the world. He writes that the horseshoe is sometimes displayed pointing upward quote, so that the luck doesn't run out, which I thought was fun. You know this idea that it's like, well, don't have it facing down, because then all the luck's going to run out of the ends of the horseshoe. But meanwhile, in other areas, other traditions. It is common to display the horseshoe with the points down.
I think of it with the points down, I think because I think of it hanging up just by a nail through the middle.
Yeah, that's the easiest to do, right. If you hang it the other way, you's a little more complicated or well, I guess it depends. I mean, you g The thing about the horseshoe, I guess too, is it is made to be nailed in place, and therefore it can be nailed in its intended place, the bottom of a horse's hoof, or it can be nailed in place on a barn wall or above your door or what have you. Anyway, Hoggard highlights two main reasons for the horseshoes perceived power. One, and it's certainly a big one, is the closer relation between humans and their horses. You know, these are animals that were highly important to the people who owned them and or used them. They were animals that we ultimately cared about, and we also had various, you know, supernatural traditions concerning them. And if not your actual mundane horses, you have these ideas of mythic horses and so forth. And this is something that also influenced the use of horse skulls and things like that in other traditions. The other key fact that he highlights is that these are made of iron, and iron was thought to provide protection against quote witchcraft and the fairy folk. Yes, and as Hoggard chronicles in that book, iron horseshoes and iron nails were often used in these household productive magics, hidden in walls and so forth. I also looked at this was an older paper, but I thought it highlighted some interesting concepts. This is an eighteen ninety six paper by Robert M. Lawrence published in the Journal of American Folklore titled The Folklore the Horseshoe, and Lawrence points out that the horseshoe, though shaped the way it's shaped for practical reasons, obviously it would have essentially stood in or resembled pre existing and potent symbols in different traditions and in different cultures, and he highlights some of the key ones here. So picture the horseshoe, just a standard horseshoe, and then think about these. The first one he mentions is the idea of an arch, just a protective arch, something that would be even in an age before horseshoes positioned above a doorway or on a threshold. I believe he highlights the I want to say a Scottish tradition of having an arch shaped from from just the branch of a tree would sometimes be used like this.
Well, this may be saying the same thing as saying that it sort of resembles an arch, but it also sort of resembles a doorway, which is like an arch and good luck symbols of various kinds are often put on or around a doorway.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a pretty solid one. The next one he brings up is that a horseshoe is also reminiscent of a serpent, and therefore it could tie into various traditions and involve the use of some sort of a serpent symbol. Be that a serpent, that's you know, I guess it depends what your snack is doing. It may be it may be straight, it may be coiled up, it may be eating its own tail. I mean, there's so many different ways the snake has been utilized in different iconography over the ages, but this one seems sensible. The idea of like the horseshoe as a serpent. Another big one the horseshoe is the crescent moon. Now the next one is one that he writes that he thinks the evidence is mediocre for this, and he's kind of begrudgingly mentioned that. He's like, I'm gonna mention it, but I don't like it. And that's that the horseshoe could also stand in for various ophallic imagery. So the horseshoe as thallus.
Huh, I need to have the case made for that. It's not evident to me. Yeah.
I looked around for more horses on this to see if there was anybody advocating for this, and I didn't find anything. Maybe it's out there and I just couldn't find it. I did see some images of some Roman phallic icons and charms that maybe kind of remind like I could maybe see it, like there's more than one way to create a phallic symbol, and some of them are I guess, more horseshoe like than others. But still I think maybe Lawrence is right and saying that maybe there's not as much sense behind this. This one I thought was interesting. The prong shape of the horseshoe as a deterrent to evil spirits or as a kind of trap. So the idea that the horseshoe is either the thing that's gonna kind of like catch the limb of an evil spirit, you know, you know, like, oh, you put your limb, your arm in there, and now you can't get it out, or kind of like the prongs of some sort of a poking fork.
Okay, Yeah, that the horseshoe does have a shape that seems to contain yeah.
In this this lined up with a lot of what Hoggard wrote about concerning witch bottles, which bottles would often have a bunch of nails in them, and the idea that like, here's this evil spirit coming into your house and then it smells some of your hair that's in this bottle that's buried.
Under the floorboards.
Oh, it went into that bottle after that hair smell, and now it's found a whole bunch of nails. Good luck getting out of their spirit.
Iron nails maybe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe they would have been in most of these cases. Now, Lawrence also points to the sacred nature of the horse and the virtues of iron, as Hoggart did. He points to examples from various cultures and traditions, including the ancient Romans, Arabic traditions, Chinese and Scottish traditions. So again, it's one of these things when you start, it's just it's spread all over. Some other ideas that he mentions include the horseshoe is a thing that captures traps or transmits bad luck. The position is sometimes important here, and like it could be a situation where it's like, Okay, here's the horseshoe. You got all your bad luck in that. Now leave it on the ground and see if someone picks it up and catches all that bad luck you just put into it. Then there's an idea of numerology coming into it, particularly concerning the number of nails in a horseshoe versus the number of nail holes. He writes, quote in Northumberland, the holes free of nails are counted as these indicate, presumably in years, how soon the finder of the shoe may expect to be married. And I guess in this case they're like, you know, you're out in the field, you find a horseshoe. It's like, oh, I found a horseshoe. Let's find out how long I'm going to be single? Which and again, you know, we're not familiar with this tradition and we can kind of snicker at it. But I guess there are a lot of things like this. I mean, it's kind of on a very very like slender level. It's almost like you know, not stepping on a crack, right, you know, like we know that's not there's not accurate, but we can't help but think about it when we do it. And so I can imagine there could be this tradition whereas, oh I found a horseshoe exciting for me, Maybe I'm going to take this home and put it up over my doorway for good luck. But also what if it's right? What if I am three years from finding my wife that sort of thing.
Well, also, I mean things like this are done for fun, even if people don't necessarily believe it's literally predictive. I mean, you know, she loves me, She loves me, not on flower pedals and stuff.
Yeah, catching the flowers at a wedding and so forth. The other thing you mentioned is that you could consider the horseshoe in its resemblance to a halo. M Okay, yeah, so I don't remember that coming up at all in our episodes about the Halo. We did a series on the Halo, and there was a lot of fun. But I guess again, we might just think of it like, what are some major icons and symbols within any given culture that could then here comes this artifact, this, here comes this horseshoe. What does that horseshoe remind us of? Now, outside of all these superstitions and so forth and older traditions, the emblem of a horseshoe, I think really potent. One example of this that came to mind is the various cartoon interpretations of this, as well as how it's presented. Sometimes in science textbooks. The horseshoe magnet has become a kind of fixed symbol for magnetism, despite the fact that horseshoe magnets are technically obsolete, since like the nineteen fifties, you don't need a horseshoe shaped magnet. All the magnets on your fridge are likely not horseshoe shaped.
I was thinking about the horseshoe magnet, and especially when you were talking about the various magical powers associated with them, because of the way horseshoe magnets are represented in cartoons, as like emitting beams of magic power or with like zigzagging lightning of magnetic I don't know what, you know, the like zappiness coming out of them.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it might be a scenario where you've stopped to think and maybe you're like, hey, do I know how magnets work? And then instantly you're struck with that cartoon image or that or that little icon your science textbook growing up, where oh, yeah, there is horseshoe lightning bolts. Now I got it, Now I can move on.
Now.
Another concept that some people may be thinking of, there's also this horseshoe theory of politics, which I'm to understand. I didn't know a lot about it previously, but it's my understanding. It's also it's not something that's really that much of a thing within actual political science, but you sometimes see it in a lot of popular discourse about people's political leanings and their ideologies. This idea that instead of it being like a sliding linear scale between on one on one end, like leftist extremism and on the other end right wing extremism, and then in the middle, you know, just just you know middle of the road, you know, neutrality and so forth. Then instead of it being shaped like that, we should really curve it, and then it's more of a horseshoe, and that by virtue of this horseshoe shape, it's illustrated that the extremes of either side are actually closer than you might think. And this is generally it's employed to talk about like either like an overarching theme, like perhaps that in the extremes there's more of a draw towards like a strong leader type or totalitarianism or something, or that you might find particular sentiments, say like an anti vaccine sentiment in both the far left and the far right, despite these groups having little else in common in terms of their ideology.
Yeah, I've heard people using this analogy in different ways. I mean, in I think in one sense it is often used to mean that people think that at the far extremes of the political spectrum people actually come to share some political ideas. And then I think the other idea is that is that at the furthest extremes of the political spectrum, people have more i don't know, sort of personality based or epistemic things in common apart from political positions. And I'm not sure which version of the of the model people are really talking about when they invoke it often.
Yeah, and I do. It kind of comes comes back to our discussion earlier though about like how do we, you know, interpreting data and thinking about like the underlying truth of a given situation or a mystery. Like obviously, the way people think about the world. They're different ideologies and their political viewpoints. I mean, there's a lot of complexity going on here, and that complexity can be overwhelming. I mean, as we try to make sense of the world's around us, the larger world and perhaps even the closer world of our friend circles and our families and so forth, and it might be tempting to say, but hey, look at this horseshoe, Look at this. I think this explains it all. You know, it provides maybe a simple model that may I mean, maybe it provides some insight, but also a level of insight that at least you can sort of nod your head at and think like, Okay, well this kind of lines up with some of the things I'm observing.
Well, yeah, I think another twist, for example, is whether or not it is useful to think about political beliefs as a spectrum at all, meaning that they extend along a single dimension, or whether it's more useful to decompose political beliefs into a number of different types of I don't know, preferences and personality traits. And then in a say, a representative democracy with two major parties we represent, we discover that political behavior manifests in varying degrees of like or dislike for those main two parties. But you know, that doesn't fully explain people's the depths of people's beliefs and preferences.
Yeah, though in isolation it can at least seem to make some sense. I had a case of this over the weekend. I was in a city that has a lot of crystal stores, so I wasn't necessarily out to venture into a crystal store, but by virtue of where I was, I just was going to wind up in one eventually, and I was looking looking around at them. Crystals are beautiful, you know, I think they can. They're nice to look at, and maybe they're a nice focus sometimes to take you out of the past in the future and put you into the present. But they have all these little notes on them about what they're good for and what focus in the crystal will allegedly do for you. And on one table I found one that it was promised would help me connect with quote Christ consciousness, and on the other it would help me communicate with extraterrestrials. And so generally speaking, I don't know. I would expect that people looking to connect with either would have rather different world views, you know, the person with the Christ crystal and the person with the extraterrestrial crystal, Like maybe they want different things out of life. But also they may have both wandered into this crystal store, which makes me think that think of the you know, the ends of the of the horseshoe, you know, arching towards each other.
Every crystal store I go in, I ask for their Nixon consciousness crystal, What will help me communicate with Nixon? He's out there somewhere.
Oh man, there's got to be a crystal. There's got to be one that will do it. Unrelated to Nixon, though, in discussing this, I am also thinking I don't think Lawrence mentioned horns or antlers, but this would seem at least just you know, off the top of my head, this would seem to be like a potent symbol to jump to and we're interpreting, like how people connected with this horseshoe with this, you know, for all intensive purposes, this new artifact that lines up with various symbols of potents like the horns and antlers have long been and still are things of symbolic power.
In a quite literal sense in their biological context, but then in a metaphorical sense to humans.
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close this episode out, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts about the horse, whof the horseshoe, interpretations of the horseshoe, the use of hoof boots, be they equine hoof boots or human hoof boots. Everything is fair game.
Right in.
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