Car manufacturers know placing the power at the rear of the vehicle allows for better balance. Nearly all race cars are rear-wheel drive so that when accelerating from a stop, the vehicle’s weight transfers to the back of the car and provides increased traction.

In many respects, the horse is the race car of the animal kingdom, a rear-view drive mammal with its hind end functioning as a piston, says Steve Kraus, head of Farrier Services and Senior Lecturer of Large Animal Surgery at Cornell University.

The certified journeyman farrier points to draft horses as proof. Heavy horses needed to stay sound so they could do draft-type work and buyers selected horses based on hocks that pointed toward each other with parallel cannon bones and a slight toe-out. This configuration places the lateral side of the hind hooves under the plumb line that is dropped from the lateral point of the hips to the ground.

“It doesn’t matter if the horse is pulling a log out of the woods, jumping a fence or roping a cow — it’s all the same,” he says. “It’s not just the…