There is a dedicated airplane for transporting horses called Air Horse One.
Just because horses are fast doesn’t mean they’re easy to transport. Often weighing more than 1,000 pounds and not exactly quick to do things they aren’t inclined to, our equine friends nevertheless often need to be brought from point A to point B. Lucky, then, that there’s a plane dedicated to ferrying horses known as (what else?) Air Horse One. Owned and operated by Tex Sutton Equine Air Transportation, it’s a Boeing 727-200 cargo aircraft used for race horses, show horses, and other VIP clients. As such, tickets don't run cheap — one-way trips can set you back $5,000.
It would appear to be worth it, however. Everything about the trip in general and the plane in particular is tailored to its passengers’ needs, from custom-built ramps and padded stalls to smooth rides that avoid steep ascents, descents, and adverse weather conditions. Air Horse One also focuses on direct flights to shorten travel times, since Appaloosas and Clydesdales dislike layovers as much as the rest of us. (No word on whether they’re served peanuts and drinks, however.) In lieu of carry-on bags, some horses even get to bring along “pets,” such as goats, to keep them company. We should all be so lucky.
Though an idiosyncratic, strangely adorable breed called Przewalski’s horse was long thought to be the last remaining wild horse, DNA tests recently proved that, like other “wild” equines, they’re actually feral. The difference? A wild breed is one that has never been domesticated, whereas feral horses are descendants of domesticated breeds that later returned to the wild. According to Sandra Olsen, a University of Kansas zooarchaeologist who worked on the study, there haven't been wild horses for quite some time: “The world lost truly wild horses perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years ago,” she said, “but we are only just now learning this fact, with the results of this research.”
