I see no reason it couldn’t be horse, but that doesn’t mean it would be any good.
You’ve been around long enough to know better, but people need to get out of their heads the notion that if horse then good. It’s a clearly mediocre (at best) leather.
I think even the more experienced of us sometimes unconsciously internalize a correlation where due to the relative unpopularity of horse leather today, it’s more likely to be used for high end uses, however this isn’t necessarily the case even in the first world.
Case in point: the Japanese make and use low grade shell cordovan to make waterproof backpacks for schoolchildren. They have a historic tradition of a lot of utilitarian uses of horse leather so I imagine it comes from that.
You’ve been around long enough to know better, but people need to get out of their heads the notion that if horse then good. It’s a clearly mediocre (at best) leather.
I think even the more experienced of us sometimes unconsciously internalize a correlation where due to the relative unpopularity of horse leather today, it’s more likely to be used for high end uses, however this isn’t necessarily the case even in the first world.
Case in point: the Japanese make and use low grade shell cordovan to make waterproof backpacks for schoolchildren. They have a historic tradition of a lot of utilitarian uses of horse leather so I imagine it comes from that.