…..horse valuation re registered breeds

[Wishfilly]

To address the general point of the thread, people definitely pay more for purebred Connemaras, but I don't know how many look at specific lines or breeding beyond being N/N for HWSD etc. Welshies definitely seem love them or hate them, and other natives do seem to be getting harder to find.

When I bought mine, I would have loved a Connemara, but they were (and still are) out of my price range! So I bought a pony with no registered breeding, but clearly a cobxsomething a bit finer. He does everything I could want of him. I do still aspire to have a purebred native one day, but equally my first priority is having a nice pony to enjoy!

 

[Orangehorse]

I specifically wanted a Morgan due to the reputation of the temperament, having decided I was too old for the TBX I had been riding up to then. They are also nice looking.

Some are hotter than others, which is a pity as the breed standard changed from one of the characteristics being "strength" to something else which led to finer, hotter horses being bred for showing, rather than the all round family horse, indeed they were the USA army cavalry breed. Of course in the USA there are lots and lots but rare in the UK.

My horse certainly had the co-operative nature that I was looking for.

 

[Wishfilly]

New uses can happen though.
It saddens me to see plough horses being bred for nothing but further breeding. It's a form of pyramid selling!
RSs, RDA & trekking centres are crying out for bigger horses & you can't move on FB without falling over wanted ads. from tall adults looking for a steady hack. There is a niche there but to exploit it you'd need to breed for longevity/soundness/good feet....
Compare that to Highlands and Shetlands, both with very healthy numbers, both without their original use but embracing a new one.

Isn't it a bit of an issue with Shires/Clydesdales etc that being bred to pull rather than carry weight, they actually can't carry as much weight as you might expect? I think for a lot of the heavy horse riding places, their weight limit is lower than you might expect.

Heavy horses crossed with something else can make good weight carriers, but then you're losing the point of keeping the breed pure!

I agree that the horses should be bred with a purpose in mind, though!

 

[rabatsa]

Heavy horses used to have good legs when used for a lot of work, look at old farming pictures. Now they are almost exclusivly bred for the show ring the hind legs have been cream crackered and they are shod from being foals for this look. Also the amount of feather has been greatly increased to improve the show look. Fifty years ago I was talking to an old man who had worked a lot with shires when younger and he said that all the best ones were sent to war. I think that he was talking about WW1.

 

[SheriffTruman]

I'll probably always buy Arabians. Hypothetically 'cause I hope my one Arabian will last me a lifetime. I like their looks, and temperament. Not the extremely typey ones though, don't want a sea horse. They are very people-oriented, and fun, generally speaking. When I bought mine, I mostly looked for soundness, and character. Specific breeding lines didn't interest me, I was having him gelded anyway.

That said, I have ridden a broad array of breeds and types, and most of them undid my preconceptions of the breed. There are good, and not-so-good individuals of every kind I guess.

 

[Glitter's fun]

I rode a pure bred Hackney for a short while in my 20s and he was a lot of fun. Pretty good at jumping but very much in his own style. I'm struggling to think if I've seen one since sadly

I knew someone who owned one in the mid 70s. Pretty sure I haven't seen one since.

 

[reynold]

I agree re the heavy horses and their hind legs now. My old friend in France aged 93 worked on a 300 acre farm in Galloway as a teenager during WW2. The farm ran with 12 clydesdales who were kept in straight stalls and taken thru a 'horse wash' every evening to clean off the mud from working. They also had no water in the stalls and were instead led to the nearby stream several times a day to drink. Fed straight oats and barley.

He used to brush and help harness the horses (and one apparently used to deliberately squash you against the side of the stall given half a chance). He also used to ride them bareback in a headcollar to the forge a few miles away.

He's looked at clydesdales online now and says they are very different in leg/feather respects to those he help with in the 40s.

He's very interesting to talk to about farming in the 30s/40s. Fields of turnips weeded by hand using the children. Cutting hay and putting it in stooks, etc.

Interestingly the farm is still going and in the ownership of the same family today.

 

[SilverLinings]

Although there may be a social/societal value in preserving breeds that are dwindling, ultimately they are only going to be financially 'worth' what the market decides. For example, hackney horses and ponies were widely valued as flashy driving horses before the mass production of cars, but since then the only market is the very small world of hackney drivers (the vast majority of carriage drivers I know don't drive or own hackneys, so it is a very niche market). The build, gait and temperament of the breed means that it is not seen as desirable by the majority of horse owners.

When the numbers of a breed drop very low then the value can increase as although there is only a small market, the 'commodity' has become scarce. Before they drop to that level though they will have little value, with plenty around for the small number of buyers to choose from.

When supply outstrips demand (however big or small that demand is) prices drop, so even with a currently popular breed like the Connemara, if enough were bred they would eventually become very cheap. At the end of the day the intrinsic value of a breed to our history or to the horse species is unrelated to financial value, which is market driven; rarity alone doesn't result in high monetary value if there aren't enough people interested in that breed to drive the price up.