My question is...how quickly would horses succumb to the weather? [/quoet]
It depends. I wintered out my horses this year - two ex racehorses and one shetland pony. The thoroughbreds lost a little weight, and their winter coats although long and thick, were very soft and downy and not at all as thick as the shetland, who, btw, thrived all winter.
As I said, the army is ill-prepared and they didn't bring much in the way of supplies or fodder, so the horses are basically forced to eat what they can find.
Would they die of hunger before freezing to death? Or would the horses tolerate the freezing cold? I'm not sure how hardy horses are in such regions.
We've had a couple of years of snow here and mine were fine. They aren't especially tough or hardy breeds. Admittedly they were fed hay and grain, but you'd see them digging in the snow to get to the grass, and our hedges took a bit of damage too.
Horses are pretty good at finding stuff to eat. That said, really harsh weather for horses in hard work who aren't used to teh climate will result in horses losing weight and possibly dying, but this will take weeks, or possibly months depending on what they can find to eat.
The bad guys are ill-informed. They think that they can just ride up north, fight the good guys and ride south...ending the engagement within a week or so. But events have delayed them and they have spent most of their supplies trying to find the good guys. Now winter is coming on full force and they've never experienced the northern lands before.
If it's going to be a long, hard ride then you should check out endurance riding - horses need to be super fit and used to the distance. A general riding horse won't cope with 100 miles a day, and if the horses isn't watered and fed it can drop dead of dehydration before the end of the day, or suffer a heart attack - I've seen both of these happen to expeienced endurance riders, so someone who isn't that used to horses over distance could well find their horses dropping dead.
I hadn't thought about breeds of horses. I probably should look into that.
Breed makes a difference for several reasons - how hardy the horse is - for instance, a thoroughbred is nowhere near as hardy as a new forest pony, for example.
However, in terms of endurance and stamina, that's all tied into the muscles of the horse - fast and slow twitch bundles - which determines speed and endurance abilities - so, you have horses like arabs that are fast and can go great distances, and horses like shires, which are slow and not capable of the same levels of endurance.
So, breed will determine how fast and how far you can go, and also the possibility of the horses being alive over winter.
Horses who are accustomed to cold can do quite well, especially if they're fed, and have a dry place to shelter (even under trees). They get a thicker coat as the weather cools, and in some breeds, they've got "features" designed to ward of cold and damp (like longer hair, or curly hair).
Horses have several layers of hair - a longer 'cat' hair layer, and a thicker, shorter underlayer.
Shetland ponies thrive in the wild in the Shetlands.
True. Shetlands have evolved to live on virtually nothing. They will even eat seaweed when hungry.
If you want to kill the horses off, a plant called ragwort is poisonous to horses. You'd have to check what kind of conditions it grows in,
Most horses won't eat ragwort because of the taste, and it's most poisonous when it's dead. It likes wet weather - you'll see it spring through summer, and it grows really fast.
You're unlikely to have much of it in winter snow though.
And then the reader doesn't have to deal with an entire herd of horses dying. Depending on the story you are telling, that might be something worth considering, because killing horses will scare people like me off faster than anything else I can think of.
If it works for the story then write it like that. Don't write for a handul of readers who will find it uncomfortable. Write for what needs to happen to make the story better - and if that means killing off a whole herd of horses, then do it.
