usage of backgrounds

I don't think I've ever managed to understand how the backgrounds' usage "work". I added a background to one of my horses. It now says "4 uses left". How can I possibly utilise these 4 uses, since they didn't come back to my inventory but stay "attached" to this horse??? Will they appear in my inventory when the horse dies ? Or do I have to "detach" them (and as a result loose the background from this horse) ? None of these options seems to be neither convenient nor useful... Is there a third possibility to this conundrum ?

Actually I wanna know this too.

Is it cause one use was already used on that horse that you equipped it to?

Since the background is technically 1 item it will stay with the horse until manually removed or when the horse dies and is automatically removed and placed back into your inventory.

When you give a horse a background, you use up 1 of the 5 uses. If you remove it you'll have 4 uses left to use on any horse you want and you use the 2nd use out of the 5 uses. And this goes on till you get to 1 use. If you remove the background and it's the last use it will disappear.

Thanks, so it is just as I thought...unfortunately... these 4 uses are kind of "taken hostage" till my horse dies...[deep sigh] such unhelpful solution with backgrounds, because it doesn't apply to bunches of apples: you give one apple from a bag and 4 apples in a bag go back to your inventory; pity it cannot be the same with backgrounds.....

Backgrounds work like tack, the uses left refers to how much durability is left of the item, not the amount of times you can use it at once.

Thanks for explaining :) Pity though...