Killing a horse through hard-riding

[ansela_jonla]

Setting: Fantasy setting

Comments

[hafital]

I don't exactly know the answer to your question, but I'd be surprised if a horse could survive beyond 10/15 minutes carrying that weight and being pushed to the max. Its heart would burst, unless maybe he was Secretariat, he of the enormous heart.

[ansela_jonla]

So I'd be better off having her gallop for a few minutes to get out of the immediate area and then slowing down the rest of the way, if I want Sally to actually make it back to the city mounted?

I'm not sure how far she'd be travelling, but she's riding for about 90 minutes to two hours before reaching the city from where the enemy was spotted.

[swan_tower]

Dittoing what others have said: if she knows anything about horses (which she presumably does), then she knows that her best bet is to pace the horse. Galloping briefly to get away is fine, but after that she'll be sticking to slower paces, walking the horse occasionally, etc. It would still be perfectly reasonable for her to miscalculate what her horse can and will put up with -- after all, she's probably never tried anything quite like this before -- so she could easily push too hard and end up on foot, praying the horse will recover. (The only odd thing there would be that if she's really, really in a hurry, she could almost certainly travel faster on her own than she could leading an exhausted horse. But you can probably come up with reasons why she doesn't leave the horse behind

[lil_shepherd]

The fact that the horse would slow right up, probably stop, its chest heaving under her, might be a clue. It wouldn't keep going, even if she was using the whip -- and she would probably have to have done to get it into that state. On the other hand, if its heart gave out, it might just fall over.

You have to remember that horses are designed by evolution to run fast for short distances (to escape predators) and to walk and trot -- with the occasional canter -- for long distances while grazing or to find food. Even racehorses, bred for the job, trained to within a inch of their lives, with lightweight humans on their backs, do not run from pillar to post in anything but sprint races. For long distance flat races (and by long distance we mean two and a half miles) and jump races (up to around four miles, with obstacles) the jockeys do not go flat out for anything but a few furlongs, if that

[infinitlight]

And all of the horses except Roland died from exhaustion in Ghent to Aix anyway!

[lil_shepherd]

"All of a moment, his roan,
Rolled neck and crop over,
Lay dead as a stone."

Possibly a good reference here.

[nuranar]

You're getting good input here, and I sure can't add to the original question. I just wanted to mention that if Sally is an experienced horsewoman/done a lot of traveling by horseback, she's not going to ride it to death miles away from the city. She'll know how to pace it to get as much possible speed for as much of the distance as she can. If that's why you're asking these questions, then good for you. ;)

Also, she ought to know the immense benefit of riding light for speed. Is there an absolutely vital reason she MUST have ALL her gear, and hers alone? If not, consider her leaving everything heavy that she could quickly get rid of, and even throwing stuff down on the way as she works it loose, including saddlebags. She can always get more things.

Oh, you might want to look up Pony Express to see the average distance a horse traveled from station to station, and perhaps how long it took. Those riders rode as light as possible, too.

[ansela_jonla]

She's only carrying her gear; everything except saddle and bridle was removed from her horse and redistributed around the rest of the group.

Sally keeping her armour and weapons is necessary. Not only will she need them when she rides out with the reaction force, there was no guarantee she would get to the city without encountering any opposition.

[stormwreath]

In 1892, around 200 officers of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies competed in a long-distance horse race between Berlin and Vienna. The distance is 391 miles; the winner completed the course in 74 hours (thus averaging just over 5 mph, though presumably he stopped to rest a few times over the course of three days in the saddle

[syntinen_laulu]

It's also a product of a different attitude to horses that has only become possible now that they aren't our basic means of transport. Pre-modern people were of necessity far less touchy-feely about horses - they had to be prepared, to trash a horse in a crisis; just as we would be prepared to trash a car, no matter how valuable, in a matter of life and death.

Several horse-borne cultures have an actual word expressing the concept of being prepared to ride one's horse to death if necessary: e.g. matacaballos in Spanish and lóhalál in Hungarian.