Westron Roans

Matthew West, while living in the western wilds of North Carolina, started with six horses in 1700 and developed three special breeds of horses before 1711. Obviously, to develop three distinct breeds so quickly with so few animals, he was using his powers to manipulate their DNA. One breed was called the Westron Champagne. It was a good general horse that could be used for riding or as a pack animal. It was larger than most breeds of the time and relatively intelligent and docile for a horse. The Champagnes also bred quickly, allowing Matthew West to use them as trade goods and as rewards to Native Americans who helped him in various ways. A second breed was the Westron Black. The Blacks were huge and massive animals with mares running about twenty hands at the withers and stallions or geldings running about twenty-five hands. They were an extremely docile breed and good for farm work or cart pulling or other things where a heap of docile muscle was needed. The third breed was the Westron Roan. The Westron Roan was his special breed.

Matthew West intentionally made the Westron Roans intelligent. It was not human intelligence, being that they were horses, or of the horse family as humans are of the great ape family (or the great apes are of the human family, depending on how one looks at it). The Roans are fairly large horses at seventeen to eighteen hands. They have a different number of chromosomes than the standard horse and are truly a different species, although not looking extremely different than a large strawberry roan horse of the species Equus ferus caballus. There are some slight differences to the shape of the head to accommodate changes to their brains, but these differences would not stand out in casual inspection. They cannot interbreed with regular horses, nor would they want to anymore than most humans would want to get down and jiggy with a chimpanzee or orangutan.

West wanted an intelligent and spirited horse for his personal use. One does not “break” a Westron Roan. One befriends them. It also helps to have psychic powers to be able to communicate better with the Roan. Attempts to “break” a Westron Roan often end in the death of anyone fool enough to try it, which will show up in a chapter of a future volume, leading to the revelation that the deceased had some unusual habits. Part of what the Westron Roan was created for was as an intelligent partner for men in war. As an intelligent war horse, the Westron Roans know how to kill and have no qualms about doing so when the situation demands it to protect their friend and rider. They will also use these skills and their mass and muscle to destroy those who try to “break” them.

Some other facets of their general character are bravery, loyalty, and fast decision-making. In what might be the sixth volume, there will be an incident where a Westron Roan protects his friend and rider after an attack by ruffians on a road through the backwoods.

Since they are an intelligent species, treating them as one would treat a normal horse would be akin to slavery. Matthew West gave some of his Westron Roans away to promulgate the breed, but he never sold them. He also instructed those to whom he passed on these creatures as to how to treat them and talked to the Roans before the gifting to ask their loyalty to their new caregivers. Over time, not all who came into possession of the Westron Roans understood their intelligence, and they were sometimes treated as normal horses and bought and sold. Their intelligence was eventually widely realized, and this sort of treatment was outlawed in most jurisdictions.