Joanne Dadson, age 10, of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada,for her question:

Why are horses measured by hands?

When you love something very much you dust hate to give it up, or even to change it in any way. People began loving horses thousands of years ago. This was before they invented writing and long before they invented inches and yards for measuring things. But naturally the first proud owners wanted to measure their horses. So they used the width of a man's hand to measure from the ground to the withers, which is the ridge between his shoulder blades.

Much later, inches and then centimeters were invented and people used them to measure all sorts of ordinary everyday things. But not the horse. Perhaps they hesitated to introduce their faithful old friend to such new fangled ideas. In any case, we still measure his height in the same old way. The hand measure is four inches, or 10.16 centimeters. A big draft horse may be 20 hands high. If your horsey friend is less than 14.2 hands tall, the experts rate him as a pony. Riding and racing horses measure from 15 to 16 hands.