While wild horses in the right environment can blend beautifully into their background, the better to fool predators, it’s another story with domestic horses – especially those pressed into service in battle. The Camoupedia is a blog dedicated to the art of becoming invisible. Fascinatingly, it includes three posts about the camouflaging of horses in …
Category Archives: Zebras
Mrs Hayes and the Zebra
Alice Hayes was a British horsewoman married to an army vet, Horace Hayes, who wrote many books on horsecare in the nineteenth century. She travelled widely with him in the course of his work, and rode a great variety of often difficult horses. The most wiley, perhaps, wasn’t a horse at all: “The most awkward …
What Do Horses Mean In New York?
I’ve been hoofing around New York and DC in the pursuit of a holiday and book two (which will be out in, ooooooh, 2015?). Shanks’ Mare and I saw a surprising number of equines on our travels, although we missed the zebra and pony on the loose on Staten Island. Books two and three are …
Whole Heap of Little Horse Links
eBay, I don’t believe you. That never happened in my daydreams. Right, on with a long overdue HHLHL! I’ve been busy organising a research trip for book two but the horse world went on turning, and lovely people have been sending me links, so enjoy this extra special post whose diversity reminds me why I’m …
If Wishes Were Horses: Jeunes Filles Bien Elevées
I loved this chapter and had far, far to much to write about, some chunks of which may appear here if not used elsewhere. Meanwhile, enjoy the slideshow. The books came largely from Archive.org. J. Collinson and Sons rocking horses. A website maintained by Nannie Power O’Donoghue’s biographer, Olga E. Lockley. The brilliantly titled Unprotected …
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The Myth of the Wild Zebra
The Chronicle of the Horse interviewed a Texan woman called Sammi Jo Stohler who has schooled her zebra to jump: “As I was training horses, I kept hearing, ‘You can’t train zebras, they’re untrainable.’ I said, ‘Why?’ To say something is untrainable implies that it can’t learn, and we all know that if they couldn’t …
Zebrart
Original poster art by David Klein for TWA in the 1950s. I found it at Flavorwire (where you can find more examples of his work), but it’s part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s permanent collection. Thank you to Anne Billson for the link.
Bars and Stripes
… a team of US computer scientists and biologists have come up with a scanner, allowing them to identify individual [zebras] from a single still photo. The system, dubbed StripeSpotter, only requires a small amount of human input. Users draw a rectangle around the zebra’s side, then this part of the image is automatically sliced …
Mourning His Lost Stones
“The wind breathed up the long hillside; remote clouds passed evenly across the sky. Now and then Jack’s big hunter brought his ears to bear; this was a recent purchase, a strongly-built bay, quite up to Jack’s sixteen stone. But it did not much care for hunting, and then like so many geldings it spent …