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little_details2025-01-21 02:08 pm
alnaperera) wrote in little_details2025-01-21 02:08 pm
Question about horses
I am writing a sort of fantasy adventure thing and it involves horses. I have no experience with them whatsoever, so I have a few questions.
1) would a horse be okay with a trip that's ~15km, roughly 100m drop but with minor ups and downs and a pretty low grade throughout (say a maximum of ten degrees for very short stretches, sustained is more like one degree)? How long will this take? What about the return trip?
2) how would they react to this being at 2 in the morning? One horse is the rider's best friend pretty much, the other horse has never met the rider before but assume it's a nice horse. The second rider is also very experienced, just not with this horse.
3) how will the react to a bicycle being a part of the party?
Editing to add a bit more context.
The party consists of the following:
1. Horse A and character A, both used to each other (in town, around town, exploring hills, committing crime together).
2. Horse B and character B. Horse B is my biggest variable because they will appear for just this trip, that's it. Generally used for riding around farms and getting to nearby cities and stuff, I don't imagine this horse being one of those big farm horses. Character B is from a culture that is very horse based and has been riding since she feasibly could, mostly training with war horses.
3. Character C and bicycle. Character C has no riding experience whatsoever and needs to arrive at the destination in reasonable shape, hence the bicycle.
The trip happens early in the morning what would be the rough equivalent of northern hemisphere early March, temperatures would be in low single digits C and warming up slowly to low double digits.
The roads are reasonably well lit for established cultural reasons.
Character A and Character B can both see in the dark much better than the average person.
They also need to start the return trip almost immediately afterwards, though they can reasonably get some rest about 2 kilometers in.
1) would a horse be okay with a trip that's ~15km, roughly 100m drop but with minor ups and downs and a pretty low grade throughout (say a maximum of ten degrees for very short stretches, sustained is more like one degree)? How long will this take? What about the return trip?
2) how would they react to this being at 2 in the morning? One horse is the rider's best friend pretty much, the other horse has never met the rider before but assume it's a nice horse. The second rider is also very experienced, just not with this horse.
3) how will the react to a bicycle being a part of the party?
Editing to add a bit more context.
The party consists of the following:
1. Horse A and character A, both used to each other (in town, around town, exploring hills, committing crime together).
2. Horse B and character B. Horse B is my biggest variable because they will appear for just this trip, that's it. Generally used for riding around farms and getting to nearby cities and stuff, I don't imagine this horse being one of those big farm horses. Character B is from a culture that is very horse based and has been riding since she feasibly could, mostly training with war horses.
3. Character C and bicycle. Character C has no riding experience whatsoever and needs to arrive at the destination in reasonable shape, hence the bicycle.
The trip happens early in the morning what would be the rough equivalent of northern hemisphere early March, temperatures would be in low single digits C and warming up slowly to low double digits.
The roads are reasonably well lit for established cultural reasons.
Character A and Character B can both see in the dark much better than the average person.
They also need to start the return trip almost immediately afterwards, though they can reasonably get some rest about 2 kilometers in.
no subject
The gait difference re: horses + human-on-bike are such that this just becomes so much more awkward than if you have a completely inexperienced rider on an experienced horse, following behind another experienced horse/rider. (Horses are trained like this all the time, especially if they're going to be getting used to pulling carriages / traveling with other horses).
Unless the bicycle is alive and another character (which it sounds like from part 3?) in which case the bike can look after itself lol.
The reason many towns in the US and the UK tend to historically be around 20-30 miles apart is because this was a pace a horse could comfortably do in a day (if trained to it, fit, and on well-graded roads) give or take, at a low speed.
Horses can easily do 15km when trained to it, horse marathons are a thing today, where such distances are considered very reasonable with moderate training (as much for the rider as the horse). This is where the experience of the riders will matter a lot. Horses are designed to graze very large territories in herds, and while they can be stationary, they can travel for days if need be to find lush meadows/pastures/grazing.
People, on the other hand, are not really built to have their legs spread apart while being jostled up and down all day, and it can lead to pretty serious (literally agonising) joint pain. When inexperienced, riders also aren't trained to know how to post or move with the horse at different gaits, which makes things harder for the horse *and* the rider (a rider also won't know if the saddle is fitting well, how to adjust the girth if necessary, how to hold their legs/feet in a way that "talks" to the horse while their legs/feet don't fatigue (it's not immediately intuitive for many).
There are different levels to 'experienced rider.' Are these folks regularly taking all-day walking/trotting trips with their horses to go to the neighbouring town? Or are they just used to going short distances to neighbouring farms? If the latter, their muscles will fatigue faster than the horses likely will (unless the horses have never been asked to take a day trip before - many horses today, including extremely experienced horses and their riders, have never been trained to do this because marathons just aren't as common now as things like dressage / event jumping and so on. The closest we get is trail rides, which are rarely an entire day - there are experienced riders who don't know what it feels like to be on a horse that's moving all day with only very short breaks, and experienced horses that don't know what this is like too, so 'Experienced' in your definition is going to vary HUGELY. If you want to make it easy on yourself, just make them horses that have either been a) trained to regularly move visitors from the rural area to the town and vice versa and who then ended up in the care of these characters, or b) dedicated to more long-distance travel, it is reasonable to expect that towns with horses have towns specifically trained for this, including rural areas - trade is important, you need ways to do it. But be aware that many of these horses are often cold/warm-bloods (i.e. the thicker, heavyset horses built more for endurance than speed))
And yes, a horse could do a return trip, but it would need decent rest / feed first. You would not be doing this to them every day.
Many horses - including those trained for this - won't do this kind of trip at night, *especially* if there's rain (depth perception is an issue with horses so many spook at water because they don't know how deep it is, this is often worse at night even with horses that can navigate water during the day).
I don't know why the trip has to be at 2am instead of say, 4am when you could feasibly make it dawn in a place closer to the polar circles, or if there's urgency and therefore the horses can't be walking. As you can tell, there is a TON of variables to consider!! :D Additionally, what are they bringing along as feed? Grass is often not going to cut it. Foods like horsebread exist for a reason,
(Experience: Have ridden, trained in Natural Horsemanship, and have done many dedicated hours of research specifically into horses as transport for my own writing, which led me into an interest in horse marathons, which I highly recommend you look further into!)
Overall 15 kmh should be more than possible with horses used/trained to these distances already, and riders who are too. Riders not trained to those distances will fail faster than horses *and* make the horse's life difficult through not knowing how to move with a horse (they don't have to *know* the horse, but they *do* need muscle memory / control). Night is going to be a big issue esp given weather. Rural areas are not generally lit and not's not realistic to make them lit without a good worldbuilding reason, even areas that *only* used horses for transport back in the day were not lighting their streets. They were either not traveling at night OR they were often *whipping* a very well-trained horse and forcing them to do it (breaking in a horse was a very different journey compared to what we have today which led to both some truly bombproof horses, and horses that were like 'fuck off' except to very specific things and people lol). (And while it happens frequently in fiction, this was not a thing people were wasting horses on potentially otherwise, they are *worth too much.* So if you're writing a 'characters escaping in the dead of night' scene, if they care about the welfare of extremely valuable animals and you haven't given them a reason to have the horses used to travelling at night (which can be resolved with some dialogue), this is just not something someone would do to horses they cared for. It's not only something horses don't like doing, it's potentially fatally dangerous to both humans and the horses - the lack of depth perception + solid night vision is a BIG issue!!!)
no subject
Some additional info from my personal experience: We used to have two horses that were moderately trained: dressage, jumping, lots of riding out into the fields for one or two hours per round. They got exercise almost every day and knew us very well.
The longest trip I did with my horse was a round trip where we visited someone several villages over and then rode back in a curve. That was something between 10 - 12 km. We did that in somewhere between 3 to 4 hours, lots of walk, but several instances of trot or canter as well, if the path was nice.
Our horses liked to trot or even canter light slopes uphill, it was good training for them. Trotting or cantering downhill is more dangerous and hard on the horses forelegs so it shouldn't be done for too long. If the road was quite steep downhill, we sometimes even dismounted and lead them for a bit as it was easier for the horses to balance only their weight. So for your story you should likely establish that the horses are well trained, quite calm and collected and not too easily spooked. Some horses are more sure-footed than others (mine was great at it, the one I'm currently riding is as well - but one horse I rode a few years ago tended to stumble over his own feet a lot... not a good trail horse!).
Horses + the dark: It's possible, especially if there's lots of trust and at least some light because of a bright moon or similar. But most horses won't like it. We usually never rode in the dark, because the horses spooked far more easily and we ourselves couldn't see that well either... Once, I completely misjudged how early the sun set in November *coughs* and was still at a training session in a different village. I rode home while it was getting dark and halfway home the sun had set and I was still out in the fields. My horse tended to spook a lot, she was quite high-strung. But surprisingly, she behaved exceptionally well, didn't spook once, was alert but not nervous, and we got home without any problems. But that was her quite special character - many other horses would have reacted differently, especially without other horses.
no subject
Don’t forget the possibility of crotch chafing! (Source: a non-Horse Girl who, in coarse 70’s polyester trousers, rode one anyway at Scout camp.)