Horses

Before you get a horse

• 💸The purchase price is the smallest number involved. Livery, feed, farrier every six weeks, dentist, vaccinations, worming and insurance run continuously, and a serious veterinary event can cost more than the horse.
• 🐎Horses are herd animals and deteriorate kept alone. Companionship is a welfare requirement, not a preference.
• 🔨Feet need attention every four to eight weeks for life, shod or not. Nothing about that schedule is flexible.
• 🚑Colic and laminitis are the two emergencies to recognise early, and both are strongly linked to diet and to sudden changes in it.
• 📅Most horses live twenty-five to thirty years — the heavy draft breeds rather less — and many outlive their usefulness for the job they were bought for. Plan for the retirement as well as the riding.
• 🩻Have a vetting done, and have it done by a vet who is not the seller's. It is the cheapest money in the whole transaction, and the things it finds are the things that make a horse unrideable rather than merely imperfect.
• 🌾The hardy natives and cobs are not the easy option they look. A good doer gets fat on grass that would barely keep an Arabian going, and fat is the direct route to laminitis — so those breeds need grazing restricted and weight watched, which is more management than feeding, not less.
• 🤝Loan or share before you buy. It costs a fraction, it is reversible, and it teaches you in six months what no amount of reading will: whether you actually want to be at a yard twice a day in February.
• 🦷Teeth need rasping by a qualified dentist or vet every six to twelve months. A horse that drops half-chewed balls of hay, loses condition or resists the bit is very often telling you about its mouth.

General guidance, not veterinary advice. Anything about a specific animal is a question for a vet who has seen it.

Horse breeds worth knowing about

A place to start rather than the whole list. Every name is a page.

• 🏁
  American quarter horse

  The most numerous breed in the world, named for the quarter-mile it outruns anything over. Calm, versatile and strongly built, with a well-known set of testable muscle and skin genetic conditions.

• 🏜️
  Arabian

  Among the oldest recognisable breeds, and the stamina animal — endurance racing is effectively theirs. Small by modern sport-horse standards, long-lived, and intelligent enough to need a thinking rider.

• 💃
  Andalusian

  The Iberian baroque horse: compact, powerful, famously trainable and the classical dressage type. Generally sensible temperament with a great deal of presence.

• 🎨
  Appaloosa

  Spotted, and the spots come with genetics worth knowing: the leopard complex gene is linked to night blindness and to recurrent uveitis, which is the commonest cause of blindness in the breed.

• 🪵
  Belgian draft

  One of the heaviest horses there is, and a reminder that draft breeds live shorter lives than lighter ones — eighteen to twenty-five years. Enormous feed bills and feathered legs that need watching for mud fever.

• 🖌️
  American paint horse

  A stock horse registered on both bloodline and coat pattern, so it is a breed rather than merely a colour. Shares the quarter horse's temperament and its testable genetic conditions.

• 

  Heatstroke, and the first ten minutes

  Heatstroke kills quickly and is entirely preventable. Which animals are at risk, the signs, and the cooling that current evidence actually supports.

• 

  Adopting a rescue animal

  Rescue animals arrive without a history and settle on their own timetable. What decompression means, what the first three months look like, and what helps.

All 21 horse breeds with photos

Every breed somebody has posted, A to Z.

• Akhal-Teke3
• American cream draft2
• American paint horse3
• American quarter horse3
• American saddlebred3
• American warmblood2
• Andalusian3
• Anglo-Arabian2
• Appaloosa3
• Arabian3
• Ardennes2
• Australian stock horse2
• Azteca2
• Bashkir curly3
• Belgian draft3
• Black forest horse3
• Boulonnais2
• Brabant2
• Brumby3
• Budyonny2
• Camargue3