We have four horses who share their lives with us. Valkyrie and her daughter Saraswati have Shire and Thoroughbred blood. Valkyrie is tall, fast, and immensely powerful, and regularly dumps me on the ground. I think I logged twelve falls off of her last summer, and was glad that I had practiced my Aikido rolls earlier in life. Saraswati is not quite two years old, and isn’t very pretty right now, since she’s growing each of her body parts at different rates. But she’ll be a big beauty someday. Rajah is my baby – just three and a half, he’s grown into a fine-looking Shire. And of course there is Indra, Rebecca’s dream horse. She’ll finally be able to ride him this year.

                        Kenton and Valkyrie
But I’m not writing to introduce you to our horses. Instead, I’m addressing a question that I’ve been asked numerous times during the past few weeks.

"Don’t the horses freeze to death in this weather?"

It’s a relevant question, because some of the nights lately have dropped down to 20 below zero (F). But even in this frigid cold, the horses seem perfectly comfortable. They stand out in the fields and eat their hay and play with their companions and don’t seem to mind the cold weather at all.

Their cold tolerance was especially apparent the other day when I was out helping to move round bales into their pastures. The cold was so extreme that all of us humans were bundled up until almost no flesh was showing, and still our eyes stung from the cold and our scarves frosted white wherever our breath escaped. We stood marveling at the horses, thinking that at the very least the tips of their ears must be subject to getting frostbitten. And their hooves! What of their hooves, which are always resting on the ground?
                                                                                                                                                Warm winter fur
I took off my gloves and put my hands in Rajah’s thick winter fur. I was astonished at the heat! There are a number of reasons the horses stay so warm – their larger size means that they have less surface area than we do in relation to their mass, so they have less places to lose heat. Their thick winter fur and superior circulation has a lot to do with it, and horses go through a number of physiological changes as winter approaches, allowing them to stay out for months in temperatures that would be lethal for an unsheltered human.

But when you rest your hands on a winter-furred horse, there’s something more magical at work than circulation and surface-to-mass ratios. With your hands buried in fur, you get a glimpse, for an instant, of a world that seems impenetrable to humans – a world where chickadees can cling with wire-thin toes to icy perches, where deer can lay down in a -20°F woodland, right in the snow, and fall asleep, and where coyotes and foxes wake up in the cold, dark hours to wander the hills and hunt for their food.

                     Happiness is a horse treat
The most we can do is bundle up in our best winter clothes and wander the hills for a short time until the chill sends us home to our hearths. But when we do venture out into the chill, we’re often rewarded with a world that is all our own – humans don’t go out in the deep cold, and in the woods you can wander among the shifting winds for hours, walking in perfect solitude. There’s a lot we can learn from animals, and if we let them inspire us to surpass our perceived boundaries, whole new worlds can open up to us.

It’s a gift we often thank our horses for.
 

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