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A Brief History of Horse Breeding
03/23/2009
But while it’s controversial, understanding horse breeding is an important part of understanding your horse’s genealogy, just as learning about your own family history would help you understand more about yourself.
Most everyone has a favorite breed of horse, but when it comes time to talk about the business of horse breeding, people get skittish. There’s good reason to be uncomfortable with horse breeding, or breeding of any sort for that matter. Horse breeding is in many ways the animal equivalent of eugenics: human beings subjectively determining what genes are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad,’ then selectively breeding the ‘good’ specimens. But while it’s controversial, understanding horse breeding is an important part of understanding your horse’s genealogy, just as learning about your own family history would help you understand more about yourself.
We know that humans began to domesticate horses around 4500 B.C. However, no firm evidence exists about the origin of horse breeding until the middle ages. The first people to engage in horse breeding were the Middle Eastern nomads the Bedouins, who bred the Arabian horse. Interestingly enough, nature had already been meddling in some horse breeding before the Bedouins: Arabian horses had evolved to withstand harsh desert climates by becoming fast, hardy, and enduring distance travelers. The Bedouins undertook horse breeding to make the Arabians more docile and easy to train. and endurance to travel long distances and survive in a harsh environment, and domestication by humans added a trainable disposition to the animal's natural abilities.
As time went on, humans needed horses for different tasks, and with each evolution, the horse breeding evolved as well. In Medieval Europe, smaller Arabian horses couldn’t handle the weight of a knight on horseback, nor the speed necessary for a joust. As a result, horse breeding produced destriers, which were almost twice the size of the average horse. During the Crusades, destriers were no match for the light and nimble Arabian horses, so the Europeans once again turned to horse breeding. By cross-breeding Arabians with destriers, a more nimble warhorse (the Percheron breed), the father of today’s Thoroughbred.
During the Renaissance, horse breeding was used to create horses of leisure. The horse breeding was undertaken by the nobility in order to exaggerate the elegant movements of the horse. It is in the Renaissance that horse breeding produced the Lipizzan, a Spanish horse known for its elegant side step and dancerly movements. As gunpowder began to shape the face of warfare in the late Renaissance, horse breeding evolved as well, creating breeds that were fast, quick, and steady.
After the 17th century British restoration, horse racing was once again legal, and quickly became more popular than ever. The nimble warhorses underwent extreme horse breeding to emphasize increasing speed, until by the beginning of the 18th century, the first Thoroughbred horses appeared.
As light carriages overtook the heavy cart as the primary means of transportation, 18th century horse breeding produced the warmblood breed. Since warmbloods have been shown to also be adept at racing, they transitioned easily into the 20th century as a sport- and racing-horse. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the industrial revolution required heavy, brute animal power to assist in many mills, so horse breeding was used to revive the heavy, powerful draft horses of the Middle Ages. Once the steam engine was invented, however, the draft horse’s numbers began to dwindle.
Today, horse breeding is more popular and profitable than ever, with pedigree becoming increasing important. Because horses birth one foal at a time, horse breeding is a slower process than dog breeding, which protects the horses from the unfortunate extremes of inbreeding often seen in certain canine breeds. But at the same time, horse breeding is a serious business, no matter how you look at it, and it has been a serious business for many years.
