Horses: the Story of Equus

“Six thousand years ago we domesticated horses and brought them back from the brink of extinction. There are now more than 60 million across the world. This is the story of three of them.\”

So begins narrator Gabriel Byrne\’s narrative in the film Horses: The Story of Equus, out on DVD today. Beautifully filmed, kids and adults will love the 45 minute documentary about three horses all born on the same day: a runaway black colt, a mischievous bay colt and a courageous chestnut filly.

One becomes a race horse and her story takes us into that extraordinary world, where the ancestry of every horse can be traced back to 1791, and where their overwhelming instinct to run is highly valued. The second is trained as a three-day eventer, but this horse is a unique individual, stubborn and temperamental. After a spectacular failure in competition, he is trained again, this time as a stunt horse in the movies and it\’s in that world that his capacity for learning and his individual nature triumph. The third horse goes on a completely different journey. He escapes from people and joins the feral herds in the wild. Out there, undisturbed by human contact, the horses revert to natural, herd behavior and this horse becomes our conduit into understanding what horses may have been like before we domesticated them.

Run with the horses on the spectacular journey these three horses embark on in this fascinating tribute to the remarkable animals that have been such an integral part of human civilization. The film is being released by Warner Home Video, with a run time of 45 minutes, and should be available through some local retailers such as Best Buy or online at Amazon.