Massive continuity of horses
‘How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks’ — Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night
Writers never ask one another questions like ‘where do you get your ideas’ because we all know the answer will be useless. Every writer’s process is personal and not very replicable. Lots of normal people do ask writers that question, though, and if you ask enough writers you’ll hear some really specific types of useless answer. There’s esoteric useless (it’s a feeling), and mercenary useless (it was a commission), and there’s whatever I do to find an idea for an essay, which I’m calling Baader-Meinhof useless. It’s like esoteric useless, but more so; sometimes a theme seems to follow me around of its own volition for a while before I realise there’s an essay trying to happen. That’s how it’s been with hooves. Horse hooves, mostly disembodied, have been trotting after me in my leisure moments for at least a year now, insisting on a little friendly attention. Hooves have been patient, awaiting their essay, and finally I think I’m ready to write it.
It started with a conversation with a friend of a friend as we sat together in a quiet corner of a party one rainy night. We had never spoken much before, and what I learned about them that night is that they cherish ungulate hooves, as symbols and exemplars of evolution. Horses, they told me, descended from small animals with five-toed paws, like so many other animals that share the same basic body plan. Pentadactyl (for five-toed) tetrapods (for four-limbed) are spread all over the map of present day animals: see bats, and dolphins, and monkeys.
The earliest known horse, Eohippus (dawn horse), was about the size of a dog, and appears 50 million years ago in the fossil record of North America. As horses grew in size their bodies adapted to changing environments. Although they grew much larger over time, they remained herbivores and prey animals, with no real weapons against large predators besides a powerful kick. Their best defense was to run as fast as possible, and gradually the four-toed front paws and three-toed back paws of Eohippus evolved into something distinctive to help them do just that: something that only seems more bizarre the more you learn about it.
As my new friend explained, evolution has whittled a horse’s paw down to a single massive finger, and the cloven hoof of a goat equates to two fingers. See the horseshoe shape of your middle fingernail when you stare at it straight on? It’s not a coincidence. A horse’s hoof is theorised to have the same distant evolutionary origin, and is even made of the same material (keratin), as your middle fingernail. Then they rolled up their trouser leg and showed me a large tattoo of a horse with pre-evolutionary feet, copied from an anatomical textbook. That elevated it from a good party conversation to a great one; I was completely charmed by the scientist’s total commitment to their niche, and by the freshly exposed oddity of the hoof.
After that, references to hooves and horseshoes kept snagging my attention. It was a subject I had never given any thought to, having never been a horse girl. As an adult I’ve entertained vague thoughts of learning to ride, for an afternoon, say, in order to better understand what characters are going through in old novels. Riding a horse looks cool, and not knowing what it’s actually like makes me feel a little disconnected from history, but most days I lack the confidence to even ride a bicycle. The thought of climbing aboard a gigantic living bicycle that has every reason to resent me makes my palms sweat. I’ve never recovered from seeing, on one of those classist mugshot websites of the mid-2000s, a photo of an American with his forehead caved in, somehow alive and committing petty crimes with a completely concave skull after surviving god-knows-what kind of accident. The phrase ‘kicked in the head by a horse’ doesn’t come up often in my circles, but whenever it does I see that mugshot again. I think somebody called him the Walmart Phineas Gage.
Months after the party I found myself reading the Wikipedia page for horseshoes, having followed a rabbit hole on my phone during a bout of insomnia. Quote:
Horseshoes have long been considered lucky. They were originally made of iron, a material that was believed to ward off evil spirits, and traditionally were held in place with seven nails, seven being the luckiest number.
The very next day I met a friend at the pub and found a stack of horseshoes on the table next to ours. I picked one up, enjoyed how cold and heavy and rusty it was, counted the nailholes, almost spilled my beer explaining everything I now knew about horseshoes to my bemused friend, a man who has disciplined interests like hiking and sticks to them. I think I’m going to write about these, I told him, and then I moved on and forgot about it again.
Then one morning a friend shared a heart-singing horse poem1 with her teenager, who is growing up so fast and beautiful:
A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
The teenager punctured the moment by replying with a gross TikTok about fairy fingers.2 Yet more horses, and their crazy feet! Fairy fingers, as several people learned that morning, are a white gelatinous substance called eponychium that coats a newborn foal’s hooves. They look incredibly unsettling—a bit like feathers or tendrils, a bit like the petals of a tulip. The eponychium is so thick that some people mistake it for the hoof itself, and believe that foals are born with very soft wet hooves that need time to harden. But it’s actually more like a slipper, covering the hard and potentially injurious hoof for the mother’s protection, so she doesn’t get kicked in the uterus by a horse. Over the first few days of the foal’s life the fairy fingers dry up and retract, rolling back until only a thin ridge remains around the base of the hoof.
The inclusion of ‘pony’ right in the middle of the word ‘eponychium’ is an extra language treat, but fairy fingers aren’t exclusive to horses. Other large ungulates are also born with them, and even humans have eponychium. It’s under our fingernails of course, which correspond to a hoof just as my friend at the party once explained. Fine, I decided that morning. I will write about horse feet, because something seems to want me to.
***
What was going on, I knew, was something called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, AKA the Frequency Illusion. It is named, a little pretentiously I think, after a German left-wing militant group that operated from the 1970s to the 1990s, whose original members lived violently, died mysteriously, and whose image seems far out of proportion to their practical impact.3 The idea of Frequency Illusion being that once you encounter an unusual word or phrase, like Baader-Meinhof, you’re primed to notice it again the next time you hear it, connecting the two seemingly improbable instances in your mind. It can feel delightful, or it can feel spooky. Sometimes people read a mystical significance into it; what are the odds of learning a new word, then hearing it again just a week later? Surely it means something. But like a psychic getting it right, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is only amazing because we don’t notice when it doesn’t work out. Nobody remembers all the times they learned a strange word then it never came up again. Everybody remembers the times it did.
Spotting patterns is a fundamental part of how humans work. Observation, repetition and extrapolation are how we know pretty much anything. Call it science, or mātauranga, or anything else. If the sun always rises in the east, and it is currently rising over yonder, then over yonder is probably east. Unfortunately, noting connections, patterns and repetitions can also lead people to some bad places, like paranoia and conspiratorial belief systems. It’s a classic good servant, bad master situation. For example, to describe oneself online as a ‘pattern noticer’ is an antisemitic dogwhistle; the pattern being alleged is that Jews are responsible for everything bad that happens. In my experience, anybody who tells you there is no such thing as a coincidence should be handled with caution.
As a little source of delight, I often record Baader-Meinhof moments that take place in the same day on my calendar or in my notes app. For example, on 3 May 2025 I read two unrelated references to the invention of NYLON a couple of hours apart. These notes wouldn’t make sense to anybody else; they’re just how I commemorate otherwise uneventful days. Logically I know that coincidence is not the universe trying to tell me something. It’s me telling myself to pay attention.
***
Ox Lennon knows more about animals than anybody else I’ve met. They have a PhD in conservation biology, and work as a conservation manager at Wellington Zoo. It was Ox who first described to me the evolution of horse hooves at that long-ago party, igniting my own slow burning interest. My interviewing skills are a bit chaotic—most of the people I write about are dead—but l knew I needed to talk to them again before I could write this essay. Luckily, they were kind enough to invite me over. The following has been edited for clarity and length, smoothing out some verbal tics and a bit of miming on both sides.
Una: We’ve talked about horse hooves and their evolution before. Would you mind giving me the rundown again of how they’ve transformed a lot over time?
Ox: Well, I’m not like a horse expert or anything. I just have an interest in all things evolution. They used to be little animals, with paws, like how most animals have paws. And then they evolved to have hooves where it went from a paw, which is a five-finger kind of situation like this (holds up hand), and they lost all these other fingers so they just end up standing on their middle fingers. Which is what the hoof is. The hoof is just a giant fingernail.
Una: The hoof is a giant fingernail.
Ox: They’re like a big giant fingernail and they’re standing on one finger. If you look at an x-ray of a horse’s foot, and if you look at all the fossils you can find of all the ancestors of horses, you can see that their hand is just that big middle finger. Their hoof is. And then you can see little bones left over from the other fingers that are still in there.
Una: What the hell is the benefit of that? Why did they evolve that way?
Ox: It’s faster, I think. They can run faster, and it’s harder. A single big fingernail is less likely to get damaged or broken or something, instead of five toes. And hoofs have evolved multiple times [into] other types of odd-toed and even-toed ungulates. Heaps of animals, maybe all vertebrates, evolved from an animal with four limbs and five fingers on each limb.
Una: Huh.
Ox: So if you look at an X-ray of a dolphin fin, that’s also just like a giant hand that’s become a big paddle like that. If you look at the X-ray of a bat wing, their wing is like a hand that’s spread out into a big wing. And then monkey paws, human paws, they’re a hand. And then the cat’s paw is the same thing, like… hold on (picks up a very handsome cat).
Una (speaking to cat): How many have you got, buddy?
Ox: Let’s see. He’s got the same kind of hand, look. You can see his little finger up there, his last finger, that one down there. He’s got one, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. And then he’s got four there. I remember his last [toe]’s gone down there.
Una: It’s fascinating that they would all be so similar when they’re such different animals.
Cat: (walks off)
Ox: Well, that’s the thing, they all came from the same evolutionary source and they branched out to fill different niches. Horses evolved to be a big running animal, that was a niche they could fill. And a hoof was good for them for that.
Una: Any idea when the last common ancestor was of all these five-fingered animals was? And when horses lost their paws?
Ox: Before mammals and reptiles and birds were separate from each other, there was this thing called a tetrapod. They’ve all got four legs. And there was some sort of probably quite reptilian-type ancestor that came out of the water and was crawling around on the banks, and it evolved four legs, and probably that’s when the fingers happened. Then some of them became dinosaurs, and very few of them became mammals, and then the dinosaurs went extinct. The leftovers from the dinosaurs turned into birds, and modern reptiles, and the little shrew thing that became all the mammals that we have now. And one of them became horses.
Una: What environment did horses evolve in?
Ox: North America, and Europe I think, when those areas were still connected together by the Bering land bridge. They definitely evolved in North America.
Una: Would that have been a grasslands situation?
Ox: Yeah, steppes, I think. Prairies, maybe.
Una: So it made sense to evolve into a running animal because…?
Ox: Well, horses are prey animals. They’re huge, but there’s cougars and wolves in North America. And bears, too. They probably wouldn’t be predated by bears, because they live in those grass areas. But wolves would hunt them. And wolves run down their prey. I’m not sure about cougars because they are solitary. They probably couldn’t catch a horse. But wolves definitely hunt ungulates, and they hunt in packs, so they could chase down a herd of horses and break one off and get it. So being able to run far and fast is like their defense mechanism since they don’t really have a lot of other stuff. They can kick. A horse versus a wolf, they’re probably pretty evenly matched, but a horse versus a pack of wolves probably would fail.
Una: What do you find so interesting about the evolution of hooves, specifically?
Ox: I love evolution. I think evolution’s really fascinating—I think it’s super neat that this fish developed four legs with five fingers, and then that became wings and hooves and hands and paws and paddles and stuff. I also really like ungulates generally. I think they’re really pretty, and cute and lovely. But not specifically horses. I wouldn’t put horses as my top ungulates. I prefer other types of wild ones.
Una: What are your top ungulates?
Ox: I think my favourite ungulate is reindeer. Then moose, or maybe mountain goats.
***
If I didn’t take note of coincidences, I would simply forget many of the everyday things I see. For example:
11 May 2025: saw three photos of Navaho squash blossom necklaces.
14 May 2025: heard two instances of the phrase ‘to blow smoke up one’s ass.’
16 May 2025: saw large statues of horses and their foals at the entrances of two different restaurants. One pair was brown and quite realistic, the other was made of white wire and more abstract.
And also:
10 May 2025: Watched two videos of Palestinian fathers crying as they discuss their dead sons. Both boys were aged around 10 or 12. Both were killed by Israeli rockets in the street. One boy was a coffee seller. The other went out to buy birthday chips. Both boys’ dead bodies are shown. The fathers look similar, especially while crying. Both say they have given up on the people of the world. This world is not a world to us, says one.
***
The Baader-Meinhof Group actually called itself the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion). It was given the more personality-oriented nickname by journalists. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were among the group’s founders and newspapers fixed on them as its representatives, a pair of slightly glamorous bogeymen. They were far left militants, opposed to capitalism, imperialism, the Vietnam War and the occupation of Palestine. The group’s members charged that West German society was still riddled with Nazis, and thus fascist—that the very same people responsible for Auschwitz were still in power 25 years later. Between 1970 and 1998, members of the RAF committed arsons, kidnappings, bank robberies, jailbreaks and murders; in total, they were accused of killing 34 people. Some were targeted, including a prominent former SS officer called Hanns Martin Schleyer; others just got in the way. Critics of the RAF—of which there are still many—alternate between calling the group terrorists and calling them mere thugs, two ideas that don’t sit well together; either their violence was politically motivated or it wasn’t.
The story of the the Baader-Meinhof group hits a special nerve, and seems to require these kinds of obfuscations in the telling to be containable.4 Maybe it’s that some of their criticisms of a supposedly rehabilitated postwar society were not deniable. After four of the founding members died in a maximum security prison—each shot or hanged, somehow or other—their autopsies were performed by Professor Hans Joachim Mallach, a former SS officer or Unterscharführer. Mallach had removed his SS tattoo after the war but remained on the far right, and hated everything the RAF stood for. He took plaster death masks of their faces as trophies, and stole the terrorists’ brains.5 The RAF’s thuggery held up a mirror to much larger thuggeries that German society hadn’t addressed and maybe still hasn’t.
***
Fairy fingers exist to protect the mother from being injured by her baby’s hooves. Do horse babies kick in the womb then, like human babies do? Are they dreaming little dreams of running, with no cart to pull and no jockey on their back, because they do not know about the human world yet? They’re about to be born into what to a horse must seem a dystopia, where you are worked hard and then end your life as pet food. It seems a dystopia to me, too. This week the horses that draw my attention are riot horses in Los Angeles. I did not know riot horses existed until I saw multiple videos of police using them to trample protestors, defending every nightmare of a dying empire against people with cardboard signs and keffiyehs. A veterinarian on Instagram explains that this is abusive to the horses, as well as to the people. Police horses are desensitised to loud noises, led into threatening situations, and made to do violence by the people sitting on their backs. It’s so far from what they evolved for, yet their faces appear calm. As is typical for prey animals, horses wear their eyes on the sides of the face, ever alert, built for watching. Predators’ eyes tend to face straight forward, like ours.
- ‘What I Didn’t Know Before’ by Ada Limon ↩︎
- I don’t often regret not having kids, but when I do it’s usually because I’ve seen one do something diabolically funny like that. ↩︎
- The first time I remember hearing the phrase Baader-Meinhof it was as the name of a side project by one of the members of Black Box Recorder. Their song “There’s Gonna Be An Accident” sounds like getting in serious trouble while wearing aviators and a turtleneck. ↩︎
- For example Schleyer is frequently described simply as an industrialist, not an Untersturmführer who remained politically active on the right. The omission makes his murder seem motiveless. ↩︎
- Ulrike Meinhof’s daughters got her brain back from a university collection in 2002. The other three remain missing. ↩︎
Una Cruickshank is a creative nonfiction writer from Pōneke Wellington. She is the author of The Chthonic Cycle, which won the E.H. McCormick Prize for Best First Book at the 2025 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and was named an inaugural New Voice of Aotearoa. She likes to write about intersections between luxury goods, capitalism and the natural world, and is now procrastinating on her second essay collection. Her work has appeared in The Spinoff, New Zealand Geographic, Turbine | Kapohau, Going Down Swinging, and Strong Words 2: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition.