Horse

Where does the horse live?

Home: With people on every continent except Antarctica.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Argentina.

The short profile

Fully grown: 142–183 cm at the shoulder, depending on the breed. It weighs about 500 kilograms. On the menu: plants.

The story behind it

Inside a hoof sits the bone that matches the tip of your finger. Everything above it is the equivalent of the rest of a finger, held clear of the ground — so a horse of around five hundred kilograms travels on the same bones a person would use standing on tiptoe. That is why a hoof has to be so hard, and why a lame horse is such a serious problem. The second thing worth knowing is how it sleeps. A horse can doze standing up by locking its legs with a system of tendons and ligaments called the stay apparatus, so it needs almost no muscle effort to stay upright. But deep, dreaming sleep does not work that way: for that a horse has to lie down, and it does so for only an hour or two every few days. A herd takes turns, because someone has to be the one still standing.

Find it on the globe

Horse is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.