If all the horses in America were turned loose, they would come to Kentucky.

There is just something about the place, many things in fact.

Of them all, the very ground itself might be the most alluring. The favorite and most natural posture for a horse is grazing. Everything about them works better when they are moving slowly across the landscape with their heads down. Their lives actually depend on it, and not simply because they are ingesting their favorite and most natural food.

When a horse puts weight on a leg, contact with the ground pushes upward, squeezing the blood out of a digital cushion underlying the frog in his hoof and sends it back toward the heart, which works against gravity. That this is the only way blood can get back through the circulatory system may come as a surprise to owners who favor stalls and grains.

So the best friend of a horse is neither groom nor owner, nor veterinarian. It is the ground across which a horse moves. And if there is any ground better than that constituting the inner Bluegrass sector of Kentucky, it has yet to be identified. This may explain why they say more good horses are raised here by accident than by design anywhere else, why the Kentucky Thoroughbred has been the most valuable and sought after equine commodity in the world for the last 60 years, and why any thought that the “Horse Capital” of the world might be anywhere else is nonsense.

For the most part, the best horses come from the best ground. And though there are no reliable statistics to prove it, a rectangular shelf of limestone-enriched soil that stretches across South Bourbon and Fayette and Woodford counties, probably best identified as the land around Keene-land, had produced more successful race horses, sales revenue and betting handle than any comparable fraction of geography in the world. For certain this unusual slice of American dirt has written for the state a sterling signature industry and given Kentucky a worldwide face of incomparable beauty.

Especially if you’re a horse.

Maybe it’s the forage. That the commonwealth was once covered with 3 million acres of native grasses tall and thick enough to obscure large animals might explain why the growth of today’s planted pastures is so rapid and persistent that a horse can probably hear it in Texas. Today’s carefully constructed smorgasbord of non-native bluegrass, timothy, orchard, alfalfa, tall fescue and red clover, when properly tended, cannot be improved on by the best nutritionists. The glistening dapples on a horse’s coat so commonly attributed to supplements and hand-rubbing by humans cannot match those worn naturally by a horse turned out on proper Kentucky pasture. Erroneously construed as a badge of fitness and good health, dapples are actually the result of excess protein — and extreme happiness.

Maybe it’s the dew. “No foot, no horse” is a well-known axiom. Sadly, less widely understood is that a horse’s foot is only as good as the ground under it. Most mornings the grass in Kentucky is bathed by dew so heavy that the humans who tread it in leather foot coverings have become known as “hard boots.” By midday the same moisture that has cooled and softened the upper breathing surface of the hooves is gone, leaving ground so firm that the soles of the feet are rendered tough enough to go unshod. A few weeks in a Kentucky pasture is a sure way to restore soundness to a horse home from six months at a racetrack with soft, cracked feet, contracted heels and long toes straining ligaments and tendons.

Maybe it’s the slopes. The most successful Kentucky racehorse farms have rolling hills up which horses can gallop, and down which water can run to disappear into the sinkholes leading to limestone caverns, only to surface again elsewhere in the springs and creeks that slice through the land.

Maybe it’s the air, forever changing and seldom stagnant, the Kentucky hilltops being perpetually kissed by Southwest winds. When I moved to Kentucky, I brought with me a 10-year-old paint mare named Tess who’d spent her life in the Midwest suffering asthma so bad she had trouble breathing and staying pregnant. Once in Woodford County, she never wheezed again, produced 11 foals including a champion, and died in my pasture naturally, suddenly and uneventfully at age 34 without showing a sign of illness or pain.

Or it could just simply be the good company. Tess was the dominant mare in a band of 10. For days after she died, the nine left behind stood under the tree, presumably in mourning or tribute. The people on the farm behaved similarly, often joining the horses under the tree.

Besides good ground, grass, water, air and slopes to run up and down, Kentucky is replete with people who love horses and who can help when they are failed by nature. I know a veterinary surgeon who can sew a cheap horse’s face back on so skillfully he turned out beautiful and won nine races. I have watched a farm vet so dedicated he sat all night in a hot barn stall adjusting life fluids to save a valuable mare everyone else said couldn’t be saved. And as most good horsemen know, there exists near Midway an extraordinary female equine chiropractor the very sight of whom can make a miserable horse joyous with relief.

When all is said and done, if there is no heaven for horses, at least there is Kentucky. And not only would horses come here on their own, they would stay forever.

Jim Squires is the breeder of 2001 Derby winner Monarchos, the author of several books about horses and a former editor of the Chicago Tribune. He lives at Two Bucks Farm in Versailles.