In Gulliver's Travels, why are the Houyhnhnms represented as horses?

The last
section ofis partially aof race-relations in European society. It would have been easy to show
the superior race as, for example, a darker-skinned race that Gulliver discovers ruling over
whites, but that would have been obvious and too easy for a writer of Swift's skill. Instead, he
uses a common beast of burden that no person thinks of as intelligent, the horse. Horses have
been domesticated and used for labor for centuries, and to show them as the rulers of a Utopian
society is to call into question every...