Grasslands are often associated with horses, but grasslands are not the only home for horses, and horse production in grasslands is not always the first. Due to technological advances, some things that subvert common sense have long appeared, such as many countries without steppes in Europe during world war I that also surpassed Mongolia in number of horses.
Before and after World War I, the world's largest horse breeding country was not Mongolia, but Tsarist Russia. The countries with the largest stocks of horses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were Russia, the United States, Argentina and Western Europe, not traditional steppe countries such as Mongolia. Tsarist Russia had a horse stock of 22.8 million in 1913, and by the end of the war in 1917 its number of horses had reached 34.5 million. The United States reached 21.3 million in 1914 and has remained around 20 million since. Mongolia had no statistics before and after World War I, and by 1966 it had 2,433,000 horses, and for the next three decades, mongolia's number of horses hovered around 200. In addition, the Mongolian steppe is fed 2 million cattle, 11 million to 13 million sheep, and more than 4 million goats (up to 5.6 million and as low as 3.79 million).
In order to ensure fairness, this article will be issued by countries such as Tsarist Russia, which also has huge grasslands, to see how many horses are owned in European countries. In 1914 France had 3.22 million horses, Germany had 4.558 million horses of all kinds before the war, and Italy and Austria-Hungary, which had dragged their comrades in World War I, also had a huge stock of horses, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had more than 3.8 million horses, and Italy's horse reserves exceeded the million mark in 1913.
Horses in these countries are basically produced on the territory of Europe, and with the exception of Italy, which does not produce more than Mongolia, the number of horses in other countries exceeds that of Mongolia. Even Belgium's horse reserves are not low, its area is only more than 30,000 square kilometers, but the horse reserves reach 478,000. This change began as early as the beginning of the 19th century, when Napoleon counted the Empire as having 3,500,011 horses (80% of the french mainland), more than Mongolia in 1966, and nearly a million horses in France by 2010.
During World War I, most of the warhorses of European countries were given to artillery units. In China, the Beiyang warlords had a huge number of Mongolian horses, but they were worried that these "divine beasts" could not pull the cannons. Before and after World War I, the Mongolian horse was also very poor, and the Mongols riding Mongolian horses did not play the prestige of their ancestors in the 20th century. Since 1904, Baiyin Dalai, Tao KeTaohu and others have made big news in the northeast, relying on the "horse change" tactic handed down by the ancestors to beat the Qing army very temperless. In 1908, Zhang Zuolin was on the line, he led more than 2,100 people from the five battalions of horses and four battalions of infantry to begin to encircle baiyin dalai and others in the north of the desert, and the han cavalry of peasants and bandits defeated the Mongol cavalry in many encounters, killing Baiyin dalai and others.
On a par with the cavalry of the Northeast Army, or even better, the cavalry of the Northwest Army, the cavalry of the Northwest Army even almost took Down Principal Jiang at one point. What is the quality of the cavalry of the Northwest Army in the eyes of the European army? According to the evaluation of Soviet military advisers, most of the cavalry of the Beiyang Army could not complete the subject of riding and jumping a one-meter-wide trench, and the cavalry in Feng Yuxiang's army had four cavalry jumping trenches, three people fell off their horses, and one person fell off his horse and was directly sent to the hospital. However, these Republic of China cavalry could still play a very good battle against the Mongols riding Mongolian horses, and the cavalry of the Jin Sui Army also defeated the Mongol cavalry many times before the War of Resistance. From the photos, these Republic of China cavalry also made extensive use of foreign horse breeds.
Mongols and Mongol horses were already vulnerable in cavalry warfare in the 20th century, and they were defeated by European horse-pulling cannons, and from the 19th century onwards, Tsarist Russian troops used a large number of horse-drawn light artillery maneuvers to defeat steppe peoples riding steppe horses in Central Asia and other places. After the emergence of good horse breeds in modern Europe, the myth of the Mongolian horse has long been shattered.
The surge in the number of horses in modern Europe, in addition to technological progress, is mainly caused by two reasons. Horses are the key to getting rich and well-off for Tsarist peasants; 88 percent of the ploughing work in Tsarist Russia is done by horses, and peasant households that raise horses can harvest 2 to 3 times more grain per mu of land per year than poor peasants without horses. The second is the need for horse-drawn carriages, no less than 1 million people are engaged in carriage transportation in the rural areas of Tsarist Russia and other countries, and up to 3 million people in the winter agricultural leisure season, and hundreds of thousands of horses are engaged in public transportation in major European cities such as London and Paris, with their own carriages and even the needs of the middle class.
Coupled with the progress of European agriculture, the horse reserves in Europe before and after the First World War reached an astonishing level, and the huge number of horses produced on the steppes was already the old yellow calendar.