Why the horse always comes first for the public

People like horses. A horse has been everything to a human, a mode of transport, a food source, a vehicle for a bet, a comrade in arms, a muse, a validation of worth, a companion, a workmate, a friend. Some say a dog is man's best friend but there is a whiff of servility in the relationship; a horse is man's equal, although for ease of daily duties he allows himself not to be. Big animals, hard of hoof and head, they command respect and repay it in their demeanour.

Horses used to be as familiar in the streets as sparrows, pulling carriages, carts, amiable beasts of burden. I can remember dray horses drawing barrels up and down Garratt Lane in Wandsworth in the late 1980s, from the Ram brewery and back again, and they seemed incongruous even then as their role shifted inexorably towards the merely recreational, as their habitat shifted irreversibly to the rural. There are horses in the field across the road as I write this, grazing peacefully in the lee of the South Downs, rugged up against the advancing evening, their breath in clouds about them.

These days – unless you come and look out of my bedroom window, and one at a time, please – people can go a long time without seeing a horse at all, unless they go to the races. When they're asked, racegoers usually say they come racing for a beer and a bet, for the social, for relaxation, for a day out. Pleasingly, sometimes they say they come to see the horses, to get close to them, to take the opportunity our forebears would not have recognised as needing to be taken to simply see them, big, close up, warm, a little wild now and again, invigorating. There is an ancient, atavistic connection between horse and human that sustains.