I came across the following quotation which adds some extra weight to the "loan-shifting" hypothesis vis-a-vis the labeling of animals encountered by the Book of Mormon peoples in the New World:
[The word “horse”] can be used in a loose sense by ordinary people. It can also be used in a more technical sense, as a synonym for the more precise biological designation of a particular subspecies of animal, namely, Equus ferus caballus, the domestic horse. Thus we have at least two distinct uses of the word horse. It is up to us which we choose to use at a particular time. Each offers a perspective. Some people think that they can avoid perspectives and reach pure objectivity through science, which develops the Equus ferus includes wild horses, since these can interbreed with domestic horses. Thus, we already confront complexity. Because of the possibility of interbreeding, the differentiation between domestic horses and wild horses is not perfectly stable. We can also wonder what to do about horses with physical defects, or horse embryos that miscarry, or genetically engineered horses whose DNA may have special elements not found elsewhere in the natural breeding-horse population. The boundaries of what counts as a horse are still not perfectly precise. But, ignoring these difficulties, we can claim to have a precisely defined word horse . . . The word horse functions like a perspective on this larger body of knowledge. The larger body of knowledge can be viewed as offering a kind of perspective on horses . . . [E]ven with the added precision of technical scientific terms, a careful inspection shows vagueness in meaning. For example, the technical label Equus ferus caballus for the subspecies of domestic horse leaves vague the boundary between a domestic horse and a wild horse, and between a normal horse and a defective horse. We can imagine a horse-like creature that becomes defective in so many respects that we hesitate about whether it is still unambiguously a horse. (Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy: A God-Centred Approach to the Big Questions [Wheaton, Illin.: Crossway, 2014], pp.118-19, 122)
