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It may sound a bit like a shoeing challenge for the farrier, but calling your horse an odd-toed ungulate is not a put-down. The term “ungulate” indicates that horses are mammals with hooves, and “odd-toed” means that they have an uneven number of toes on their rear feet. Horses have single toes (hooves) on all four feet, but this is not true of some other animals in the order Perissodactyla (derived from Greek for “uneven toes or fingers”).  Tapirs and rhinoceroses, the horse’s moderately close cousins, have three toes on each hind foot.

Odd-toed ungulates are grazing animals with simple stomachs, while some even-toed grazing ungulates like cattle have multiple stomach chambers. Horses, tapirs, and rhinoceroses are hindgut fermenters that digest fibrous plants in their intestines.

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