Science Experiments with Horses

[xxRuumorxHasxItxx]

hi. I am doing a science experiment. and i would like to do one with horses, since I have been riding my whole life. I have a few Ideas but i'm not sure which to do. My ideas are: Does weather effect your horse's speed? I was going to go out different days when the weather is completly opposite and i would try different horses and time them jumping. My other idea was: Does the length of a horse's leg determine how high they can jump? And for that I would measure the horse's leg, then test how high they could jump. I would really appreciate someone's help. I'm not sure which one is a better experiment to do for an 8th grade science project. Thank you.

[deleted-71536]

Hi,

It's great that you are considering topics in an area that interests you!

You should do whichever project interests you, but my advice would be to do the leg length project, because leg length is more easily quantified (put into numbers) than weather. This will allow you to make easily readable graphs to present your data.

To help you get started, I found a study relating leg length and jumping height in humans: http://209.168.240.42/article/parameter ... ump-height

Keep in mind that you should have each horse jump multiple times and take an average. This ensures the repeatability of your results. Also, you need to control for things like the weight and riding style of the rider (if someone is on the horse during the jump); the best way to do this is to have the same person jumping the horse each time.

How do you plan to measure the height of the jump?

Heather

[deleted-2574]

Hi xxRuumorxHasxItxx,

Welcome to the forum!

On sciencebuddies, I found only one project that looked applicable:

Tricks for Treats: How Long Does It Take to Train Your Pet?
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p025.shtml
The other animal projects seemed to be either cat, dog or mouse oriented (I'm open to suggestions here).

On the web, I found two references. The first has many projects. The second has a specific project:

1. 4-H: Horse Projects:
http://4h.uwex.edu/onlinpro/horses.cfm

2. Horses: Does the length of a horse's leg determine how high it can jump?
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/pages ... topics.asp

Note: the theme of the sciencenewsforkids reference has already been suggested. The sciencenewsforkids reference adds the new information that the project was a semifinalist in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge.

The second reference has the same theme already cited, but may have a different slant.

[deleted-2574]

All,

Oops!

In my last post, the sentence "The second reference has the same theme already cited, but may have a different slant." should have been deleted.

The different slant was the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge information.

No matter how many times you proofread bleep there, sigh, can always be a typo.