Other Books by Steven Price
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Steven Price's Horseman's Illustrated Dictionary is both excellent and very poor.

When I first looked at it, I was impressed. It's attractively laid out, comprehensive and well-illustrated. Here's your source for the meaning of words used in the context of horses.

Are you an English rider who has wondered what western riders meant by a leak? Or a western rider who has wondered what an in-and-out was? This book will tell you. It defines terms from racing, foxhunting and specialty equestrian sports as well as ordinary English and western riding. It will tell you that Buttermilk was Dale Evan's horse and that Federico Caprilli was an Italian horseman credited with the development of the forward seat.

At the end of his introduction, Price says "Although every effort was taken to make this book as accurate as possible, if an error of fact or judgment slipped in, let me apologize in the spirit of Samuel Johnson: When asked how he came to define 'pastern' in his dictionary as 'the knee of a horse', Johnson replied, 'Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.'"

Samuel Johnson had an excuse -- he didn't have much to go on when he compiled his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Any number of sources would have told Price that an 'aged' horse is seven (or nine) or older, not four. The term has to do with the age past which it is no longer easy to tell age from teeth. A four-year-old still doesn't have all his adult teeth. A pony is not a species of equine. Equine caballus is the species. Tiny ponies or huge draft horses are just breeds within the single species of horse. And Elwyn Hartley Edwards would probably wince at some of Price's definitions of bits. 

However, overall, Price's dictionary is well worth owning. The book's strength lies in its explanations of ordinary terms that horse people use all the time -- the jargon of the equestrian world. For specialized information, you need to go to books written by experts in their field.

By the way, according to Price, leak is "Of a cutting horse, to lose the advantage over a cow by moving toward the animal instead of staying back and waiting for the cow to move forward." An in-and-out: "In jumping, a combination of two fences set one cantering stride, or approximately twenty-four feet, apart. The combination comes from foxhunting, where horses might be asked to jump over a fence out of a field, across a country lane, and over a second fence into the next field."