The horse (tswana: itona; shona: bhiza) was initially introduced to Botswana from South Africa by European explorers and colonists in the 19th century.

The presence of horses is most marked in the Maun and Western regions, where the sand of the Kalahari Desert makes it difficult to travel with motorized vehicles.

[1] There are records of exploration of the territory that became Bechuanaland and then Botswana by the Englishman William Cornwallis Harris in 1836, followed by other white European riders in the 1840s.

In 1916, Khama, the Ksogi (tribal chief) of the Bamangwato people in Bechuanaland, was struck in the knee by a horse; he then invited his son Sekgoma II, who had been in exile for 10 years, to rule in Serowe.

[16] The Dobe !Kung depended heavily on hunting in the early 1960s, when their population grew and relied on the use of horses, firearms and motorized vehicles.

[17] The gradual development of roads and transport infrastructure has made the use of horses unnecessary in some densely populated areas of the country.

[19] In the 1980s and 1990s, young people able to buy or rent a horse favored this spear hunting technique, thanks to the transmission of riding skills.

[26] In 2023, the Horse Society of Botswana is organizing ten official competitions in the country: four in show jumping, one in dressage, one in combined driving, five in endurance riding, one in reining, one in acrobatics, one in para-dressage and one in para-harnessing.

[26] In her thesis defended in 2020 at the University of Botswana, Tinieri Maeresera argues that horse manure can fertilize Cenchrus ciliaris plantations.

[19] There is also some bushmeat poaching (particularly in the Okavango delta), based on the recent development of horse-drawn pursuit practices, which is detrimental to tourism.

[31] According to the president of the Botswana Endurance Riding Association (BERA), Sharon Du Plessis, the national practice of endurance riding dates back to the late 1990s, when several Botswana riders jointly realized that there were enough of them to organize viable competitions in their own country, rather than travel to South Africa.

[32] The Lobatse race, another prestigious event, takes place on stonier ground and attracts participants from Spain, Abu Dhabi, Britain, Namibia and South Africa.

[32] Botswanan riders compete in South Africa to qualify for the longer distances required for the World Endurance Championships.

[14] The book Equine Science (2017) provides no estimate of Botswana's horse population;[45] however, Chris J. Mortensen indicates on the basis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) the presence of a herd of 30 907 head in 2014.

[48] The Thoroughbred is bred locally for outbreeding, working equitation and income generation, as well as for cultural reasons such as horse racing and sport riding.

[61] The hottest regions of southern Africa are infested with tsetse flies (Glossina), which transmit trypanosomes, blood parasites that cause a fatal disease in horses, nagana.

[64] In L'enfant et le cheval de vent (2016), author Rupert Isaacson recounts a journey with his autistic son Rowan to ride horses among the Bushmen of Namibia, then in Botswana.

[68] Because of his support for native peoples in his book Les deniers homes du Kalahari (2008), Isaacson was banned from Botswana.