Larry Askins always has amazing facts at the Marshall Rotary Club's weekly meetings on Thursdays.

So after browsing around on the Internet, I thought I would do my own version of amazing facts. And these are about horses!

* The tallest horse on record was a Shire named Samson. He was 21.2 hands (7 feet, 2 inches) tall. He was born in 1846 in Toddington Mills, England. An average recreational horse is 15 hands (5 feet) tall.

* The oldest horse on record is "Old Billy," an English barge horse. He was 62 years old when he died, living from 1760 to 1822. An average lifespan for a horse is about 20 to 25 years.

* The record for the highest jump made by a horse is held by a horse named Huaso who jumped 8 feet, 1 1/4 inches on Feb. 5, 1949, in Vina del Mar, Chile. He was ridden by Captain Alberto Larraguibel.

* The record for the longest jump over water is held by a horse named Something who jumped 27 feet, 6 3/4 inches on April 25, 1975, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was ridden by Andre Ferreira.

* Horses cannot breathe through their mouths.

* Horses produce approximately 10 gallons of saliva a day.

* The average horse's heart weighs about 9 or 10 pounds.

* Adult horses have teeth that are several inches long. Most of the tooth cannot be seen because it is below the gum line. Little by little the teeth erupt through the gum to replace the surface of the teeth as they are worn down.

* A horse can see better at night than a human. However, it takes a horse's eyes longer to adjust from light to dark and from dark to light than a human's.

*A female horse, or mare, is actually the one that decides when the herd moves to another spot to find food in the wild.

* The reason someone doesn't see all the horses in a field laying down at once is because one animal always stands "on look out" to be able to alert the others to any dangers.

* Horses have one leg (or side) that is a hair shorter than the other. By seeing which side of the neck a horse's mane falls on helps you know which front leg is the shortest. The mane will fall to the short-legged side.

* Horses lock the muscles in their legs so they can go to sleep standing up and not fall over. This was a useful trick when horses lived as wild animals and needed to be able to make a fast get away from a predator.

* There are no two zebras have stripes that are exactly alike. It's not only zebra's fur that is striped, their skin is also striped.

* All horses in the United States celebrate their birthday on Jan. 1.

On the Net:

http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorseFacts...

http://www.limebrook.com/horseyfacts.htm...

http://library.thinkquest.org/3887/facts...