When I first joined EQUUS many years ago, I remember a story that was told and retold at staff meetings, usually when we were discussing plans for our editorial calendar or some impending project. The story came from the magazine’s earliest days, when the magazine’s founder, Ami Shinitzky, was seeking investors to support his concept for an entirely new type of horse magazine—one that covered all breeds and all riding disciplines and told people in plain terms how to care for their horses as well as how to understand them.

Potential investors would politely listen to Ami’s pitch about the many ways that EQUUS would serve its audience. How the magazine would become the “voice of the horse,” educating readers about equine physiology, disease, behavior and all aspects of care and ownership. How it would serve as a bridge between layman and the veterinarian.

More than once, though, at the end of this presentation the same question would come from the listeners: Wouldn’t a magazine about horses run out of ideas after a year or two? After all, you ride, train and feed horses, the questioner would say. When they get hurt you treat them, when they get sick, you give them medicine—what more is there to say?

That story was always good for a chuckle, even back in the 1990s, when most Americans accessed the Internet through AOL.com and simply having cable television felt like the cutting edge. We didn’t have access to the vast stores of information available online today, but we never ran out of ideas. And the same is true today. In fact, we don’t have trouble coming up with things to cover in EQUUS; instead our main challenge is finding space for all that we want to include in each issue.

Many things have changed since EQUUS published its first issue in 1977, but one thing hasn’t and never will: the wonderful creatures that inspire us to look beyond the obvious, seek to understand more about them and to experience horse ownership to the fullest.