Mapping milestones of America’s horse breeds

From the wild subspecies of Equus caballus found in Europe, western Asia and North Africa over the millennia came the horses we know and love today.

From the wild subspecies of Equus caballus found in Europe, western Asia and North Africa over the millennia came the horses we know and love today.

We have come a long way together since beginning this series on the history of horse breeding way back in April of 2014 (“The Origin of Horse Breeds,” EQUUS 439). At this point we are halfway through our review of breeds and are about to look at the history of the American Quarter Horse, currently the world’s most populous horse breed with more than five million registered animals. But first, I want to pause for a recap---an instant replay of sorts that will help us to see how events in history set the stage for the appearance of the “All American” Quarter Horse.

My objective all along has been to tell the whole story of horse breeding, beginning with the time just after the end of the last great Ice Age when people in several areas of Eurasia became able to capture wild horses and bring them into domestication. This series so far has carried us from that point nearly 6,000 years in the past, through numerous important milestones in both European and American horse breeding, right up into the 21st century.

The history of horse breeding is not only fascinating but complex. It is intimately intertwined with human history, because where people go so, too, go their domestic animals. The horse in particular has been a crucial---and usually under-credited---factor in human migration, trade, agriculture, invention and industry.

Warfare would not have evolved had it not been for the horse’s ability to give men strength and mobility far in excess of their natural powers. In ancient times this not only tempted them to covet, but largely guaranteed that they could get away with theft, rape, pillage and murder in raids against villagers who did not yet possess horses. From the time of the Pharaohs until the end of World War I, almost all armed conflicts, whether mere skirmishes or great wars, were won by the side that had the best horses. The horse has impacted the culture of many a tribe, city-state, kingdom and empire and has helped to shape the very map of the world.

PUTTING hORSE BREEDS ON THE MAP

Maps indeed have been one of my main tools in presenting this story, because without a map as reference and guide the reader is likely to get lost in the welter of historical detail. In this article, I present a series of six maps that summarize important milestones that brought horses into domestication, then into western Europe, and from there to the Americas. On the maps

I have placed “icons”---little images that represent breeds that contributed to the development of new breeds in each geographic area. Please note what this implies: There are no “pure”-bred horses; all breeds represent either selections from one of four populations (wild subspecies) that existed during the Pleistocene Ice Age or mixtures of these. All breeds began as “experiments” in crossing mares and stallions from different herds or even different geographic areas that probably would never have met or mated in the wild. Domestic horse breeds, unlike wild subspecies, exist only because of the beliefs, needs and efforts of people.

I have drawn the icons representing various subspecies and breeds with great care; they are the product of extensive research, in quest of giving the reader the best possible idea of what different breeds look like, even the ancient ones. Icons that represent breeds in existence before the invention of photography are based on artwork, which (perhaps surprisingly) is often very representational and accurate. Other images are based on actual photographs; readers who have followed this series will already be aware that my files contain a very large number of horse photos, both historical and recent.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXTINCT BREEDS

This article is intended to be a visual treat as well as a handy reference guide. The research that has gone into this series has made it possible to visualize breeds that no longer exist. The most important of these is the English-Irish Hobby, whose blood forms the basis for the distaff side of the pedigree in the Thoroughbred, Morgan, American Saddlebred, American Standardbred, Tennessee Walking Horse and American

Quarter Horse. The Hobby, even though it is extinct as such, is thus rightly called the world’s most important horse breed. In England, Hobbies of the “royal” strain played a crucial role in the development of the Thoroughbred. The English Running Horse---another extinct breed that forms part of the ancestry of the Thoroughbred---was also based on Hobby.

The Hobby’s nearest surviving relative is the Kerry Bog horse, which I have used as a model for the type of Hobby first imported between 1620 and 1630 from England direct to the English Colonies in North America. The Narragansett Pacer (which became extinct in the early 19th century) came about by topcrossing New England Hobbies with Thoroughbred and a dash

of Caribbean Spanish. New England Hobbies also played an important role in founding the Morgan (“The Mystery of the Morgan Horse,” EQUUS 469). Other Hobbies, imported to Virginia and the Carolinas in the early 17th century, became the mare-base for the Choctaw-Chickasaw and--another extinct but enormously important breed---the Colonial Quarter Running Horse (abbreviated CQRH). This breed can also be called the Colonial Riding Horse, as transportation was in fact its primary function, whereas its use as a racehorse was in most cases occasional and incidental. Like its ancestors the Hobby, Morgan and Narragansett Pacer, the CQRH enjoyed widespread popularity as a mount because its mid-speed

gait was a comfortable amble.

DEFINING BOUNDARIES

Horse breeds are not species, but I’m going to talk about species for a moment because looking at the species level helps explain the difficulties scientists face when assigning names to different groups of animals. The problem lies in determining where the boundaries between populations should be drawn. The biological definition of “species” is very clear: a population in which any individual can potentially mate with any other to produce fertile offspring, yet not be able to do the same with a member of any other population. The boundary between one species and another would thus seem to be quite distinct.

In real life, however, the dividing line between species can become difficult to pinpoint. This happens when species, like lions and tigers or horses and asses, that in nature occupy different geographical areas, are brought together in zoos or on farms to produce “tiglons,” “ligers,” mules and hinnies. These examples involve human agency, but nature also presents many examples of “fuzzy” interspecific interactions. For example, it is likely that up to 30 percent of coyote populations in North America now contain dog genes, reflecting the fact that coyote females are frequently covered by male domestic dogs, so that many apparent “coyotes” are really hybrid coydogs.

This becomes extremely important when we realize that although mules and hinnies are sterile after the second generation even when bred back to the parent species, the male or female coydog produces fertile offspring whether bred to coyote, dog or another coydog. Where is the boundary, then, between the coyote species Canis latrans and the dog species Canis lupus?

It gets worse. When I was a graduate student, the wolf’s official scientific name was Canis lupus, but the name given to the domestic dog was Canis familiaris, implying a clear distinction between dog and wolf. Over the succeeding 40 years, however, archaeological and genetic research has shown that the domestic dog is the direct descendant of the wolf. Thus, by the rules of scientific nomenclature, the domestic dog has been reclassified as Canis lupus. In short, the two are now considered to be a single species, with the dog’s differences from the wolf acknowledged only at the subspecific level because dogs and wolves remain fully interfertile. Because they are related as ancestor and descendant, there is no firm boundary---either in nature, or in terms of taxonomic classification ---between the wild wolf and the domestic dog.

Boundaries also become fuzzy when we consider bloodlines through long

spans of time. If we had a complete fossil record---skulls, teeth and bones from every generation of horses that has ever lived ---where would we draw the line between ancestors and descendants? Ultimately, this would mean assigning a sire to one species but all his colts and fillies to another! In reality, we have nothing like a complete fossil record, but instead we have fossils of perhaps 15 percent of all the kinds of horses that lived in earlier time periods. And the Equidae is considered one of the betterknown families! Of necessity this means there are many gaps in the fossil record; scientists take practical advantage of their existence and draw the boundaries between species through them. Such lines of division look like sharp boundaries, but in reality they are arbitrary and artificial. When we look closely, all taxonomic categories turn out to have fuzzy edges.

CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE OF EXTINCT BREEDS

Fuzziness characterizes the boundaries between all horse breeds. Breeds are created by people, and they are not species because a stallion of any breed can mate with a mare of any other breed and get a perfectly healthy, fertile foal. Many of the breeds reviewed here are now extinct. For example, on Map 2, which represents a time about 2,500 years ago, we see two such: the Cornish and Brittany ponies. This is not to say that there are not still horses indigenous to the Cornwall and Brittany peninsulas, but

they have by now been mixed sufficiently with other breeds so as to no longer closely resemble what written records and artwork tell us they originally looked like. In this sense, they are “extinct”---yet before becoming extinct, they contributed to the development of new breeds. The maps that form the backbone of this article show that the history of horse breeding should be thought of as a succession of horse populations whose conformation and performance capabilities have changed over the centuries.

In contrast to the Cornish and Brittany ponies, the present Kerry Bog population does resemble the ancient and original Hobby---enough so that I have used a Kerry Bog stallion as the model for the historical English-Irish and New England Hobbies. We still have the Kerry Bog horse because it survived as a feral population in the backcountry of Ireland.

Likewise, the rugged, mountainous country across the northern coastline of Iberia has acted as a refugium in which the Asturian, Galiceño, Navarreño and Basque horses perpetuate the ancient historic Spanish Jennet, which is the ancestor not only of the American mustang but of all the Paso and Criollo breeds of the Caribbean, Central and South America. I have used a living Asturian stallion as the model for this icon; the astonishing resemblance between this horse and the Kerry Bog-Hobby is testament to the strong trading ties that have existed for the past 2,500 years between northern Iberia and “Hibernia,” the ancient word for Ireland.

All the horse breeds depicted on Map 2 are in fact quite similar, because all of them were created during the same early historical period by Phoenician traders who sailed from the Levant westward through the Straits of Gibraltar in quest of tin, copper, lead and cattle. On their ships they brought trade goods, including stallions of AfroTurkic derivation, which upon arrival in far western Europe covered native mares of the Draft subspecies (see Map 1). Horses of these two subspecies would never have encountered each other had it not been for human intervention. The results of this “experiment” in outcrossing---in the form of the Irish Hobby, Brittany and Spanish Jennet--have been crucially important in the development of all American breeds.

We advance some two millennia in time to arrive at the next important phase of horse breeding, represented on Map 3. Here we find two more extinct breeds---the Royal strain of Hobby (11) and the English Running Horse (12). I have used representational artwork to create the icons for these breeds: The Royal Hobby comes from a medallion struck in Queen Elizabeth I’s time in about 1560, while the English Running Horse is drawn from an Italian painting of about the same date (I could also have used any of Leonardo da Vinci’s horse sketches for a 15th century representation or those of James Seymour made during the early 19th century).

With Map 4 we come forward another 200 years to the pre-Revolutionary period in the American Colonies, and here again we find extinct breeds. Horse 8 is identical to the EnglishIrish Hobby, because we know that Massachusetts colonists imported Hobbies directly from England. The “Virginia Hobby” (18) shows a slightly different form of Hobby because importation to Virginia came from a different area of England. Once having arrived on North American shores, their history diverges from that of their European ancestors, so it is useful to call horse 8

“the New England Hobby” and horse 18 “the Virginia Hobby,” both of which are now extinct. Mares of the New England population formed the basis for the development of horse 19, the Narragansett Pacer; the topcross was with ambler-galloper Thoroughbred (15) and Caribbean Spanish (17). The

Narragansett Pacer became extinct “as such” before the Civil War, but backcountry populations of similar horses--all very fast pacers---survive to this day in Appalachian areas of Virginia and the Carolinas (“Horses of the American Colonies,” EQUUS 468).

New England and the Ohio Valley