[USMA:30067] Horses and hands

[Harry Wyeth]

The problem we face switching people from measuring horses in cm vs "hands" is not only tradition, but the fact that there is some convenience in the "hands" method.  As a horse owner myself, I can tell readers that the height of a horse is an important factor in deciding whether to buy a specific animal.  It depends on the height of the owner, but for many people a horse over "15.2" hands is too tall to mount easily.  The range of normal variation is usually only a couple of "points", ie, "14.2" to "15.2", so there are only a few numbers to deal with.  No one actually thinks that a 14.3 horse is so-and-so feet high.  I wonder how measuring heights of horses in units of 10 cm would work: The range would normally be just 145-155 cm.  Horse owners would not want to deal with individual centimeters (147, 148, etc) and would want to just stick with the four inches in each "hand".   And in the US at least, many horse owners are country people who don't want to be told what to do!   This is just info about what we face--I am not defending the present system!   HARRY WYETH