Month: January 2026

Let me ruin every Western movie for you

What is the one thing you associate most with Westerns? Horses, right? Wrong! There are actually almost no horses in any Western movies you will ever watch. To prove the point, consider this picture of Clint Eastwood from the classic Rawhide, standing next to a ‘horse’:

Clinty Eastwood came to town, riding on a pony…

From this photo, we can see fairly clearly that the ‘withers’ of the equine in question (i.e. the ridge between the shoulder blades) reach up to just below Eastwood’s nipples. As any artist who has studied human anatomy can tell you, the distance from nipple to the top of the head is about 25% of total height.

Now we know Eastwood to be a tall man – the internet reliably informs me that he is in fact 193cm (6’4″) in height. Therefore we can estimate the distance from Eastwood’s crown to his nipple to be 48.25cm. Given the ‘horse’ and Eastwood are standing side by side, this yields a height from withers to hoof of 144.74cm.

But here’s the rub, fellow movie-watchers: Any equine below 147cm (14.2 hands) is not a horse, rather a ‘pony’! In fact, the animal pictured here is only a tad bigger than Coca, the pony my 8 year old daughter rides at our local stables.

Of course, my eyeball estimate could be a centimetre off, but even being generous, this animal barely crosses the threshold. To drive the point home, compare Clint with historical photos. Here we have one of the most famous horses in American history, Comanche, with his 185cm (6’1″) rider, Captain Myles Keogh. Note how Keogh’s eyes (eyes to crown: 0.5% of body) align with Comanche’s withers. Using our body proportions method, we can estimate the sole equine survivor of Little Bighorn stood 173cm (17 hands) tall – a good size horse, by any standards!

Captn Keogh (185cm) with Comanche,

Now consider this: if even mighty Clint had such a diminutive mount, what of the other, mostly shorter, cowboys who grace the silver screen? Go back and watch the movies and you can answer the question for yourself.

In reality, if actual cowboys tried to ride off into the sunset on such little ponies, saddlebags, guns and all, the animals would not get them more than a few miles from Tombstone before collapsing with fatigue. So why do directors choose to pair these mighty tough guys with the sort of puny ride that daddy’s little princess canters around with at overpriced stables in the Connecticut suburbs?

A few reasons: First, because the pairing automatically makes the director’s cowboy look bigger than he really is – that’s almost always a good thing. More practically, unless you are supremely athletic and dressed appropriately, jumping up onto a real horse is quite hard to do. And having your grizzly desperado drag over the mounting block so he can scramble his way into the saddle would take away from the magic of the screen. Ponies are also smaller, thus cheaper to feed and stable. And if the actor loses his stirrups mid-scene, he is less likely to be hurt from the shorter fall.

Most importantly, Hollywood does this because they can get away with it. Few movie-goers spend much time with actual horses, so they have no point of reference in real life for how big a horse should be.

It’s yet another reason to get off the couch, away from the phone, climb into the saddle and ride into the saloon of real life.

My review of Horatio Clare’s ‘Something of his Art’

Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach by Horatio Clare

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


There is a style of book that populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. It is a gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the insides of your university-educated ego as you delight in a particularly well-crafted metaphor, or the deployment of a somewhat archaic adjective you imagine other classes of reader would be forced to look up on their phones.
Such is the book Horatio Clare sat down to produce when writing Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J.S.Bach (Field Notes). A sheaf of said field notes – most likely handwritten – lay next to a computer, perhaps held in place by a mug of good coffee, as Horatio set about recounting his ‘adventures’ while recording a BBC documentary that follows the historic walk of Johann Sebastian Bach across the Germany of 1705.
The problem is, Clare largely fails. To be fair, there are exceptionally well-written passages lost in the long and wearisome trek that is this short tract. But its central purpose – to give the reader a sense of the young J.S. Bach and his walk from Central Germany to the coastal city of Lubeck, to meet the then-famous composer Buxtehude – is lost.
We do not get Something of Bach’s Art. Instead we get a rather dry, tired account of three middle-aged men on a work assignment for the British state broadcaster. We learn much about Horatio Clare: he likes birds and wishes Europe had more of them, in that vague way of the comfortable urban naturalist shielded from the realities of the nature he adores. He dislikes right-wing populism, yet he very much likes virtue-signalling that fact. Most of all, he is rather indifferent to Bach’s music and its German cultural context, instead treating it like the work subject we know it was. He does not even bother to hide the fact that the ‘walk’ he takes in Bach’s footsteps is mostly a series of train and taxi short-cuts to the next hotel.
Perhaps not much is known of Bach or his walk to Lubeck, and so Clare had not much to tell without drifting fully into fiction-writing? Perhaps the very idea of walking in Bach’s long-erased footsteps was a silly one? Or perhaps the BBC documentary (that I did not watch) is well-edited in a way these field notes are not, and therefore tells that story much better?
In any event, we do learn something of Horatio Clare’s Art – specifically that he is prepared to put his name to a book that never ought been published; great tits, wood pigeons and all.



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