The term "Horse culture" is used to define a tribal group

Tribe

A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...

 or community

Community

The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...

 whose day to day life revolves around the herding and breeding of horse

Horse

The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...

s. Notable examples are the Mongols

Mongols

Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...

 of Mongolia

Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...

, and the American Indians of the Great Plains

Great Plains

The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

, after horses were imported from Eurasia

Eurasia

Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...

, particularly from Spain, during the 16th century.

History offers many examples of horse cultures, such as the Huns

Huns

The Huns were a group of nomadic people who, appearing from east of the Volga River, migrated into Europe c. AD 370 and established the vast Hunnic Empire there. Since de Guignes linked them with the Xiongnu, who had been northern neighbours of China 300 years prior to the emergence of the Huns,...

 and other peoples in Europe and Asia. Horse cultures tend to place a great deal of importance on horses and by their very nature are nomad

Nomad

Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...

ic and usually hunter-gatherer

Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...

 or nomadic pastoralist societies.

As the natives progressed throughout the plains, so did their culture. The natives stumbled onto something that would revolutionize their entire world, the horse. As the horse was integrated into the lives of the natives it also transformed the vision of the plains for them. For the natives, the horse was a very valuable resource. They used horses for transportation as well as for breeding and trading purposes. The use of horses revolutionized hunting for the natives and was used successfully and efficiently in warfare. The main advantage to this revolved around increased mobility: the ability of the horse to cover a lot of ground in a very short period of time. In a sense the horse offered the natives liberation and allowed them to easily move place to place, bringing on a nomadic shift in their culture.
However, there were also disadvantages to adopting horse culture. These included the risk of horse theft as well as the responsibility to care for the horses and keep them healthy. Adoption of this culture also required the natives to live in smaller groups, as opposed to the larger groups which had existed for hundreds of years. This allowed room for horses to graze and feed easily.