Talk:List of gaited horse breeds

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Sources

Potential hereditary trait:

http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=20594

Non-list

Is there any need to unredirect the "gaited horse" and turn it into a stand-alone article? It seems to me that there's enough coverage in books, magazines, reliable places, to justify a separate article that's not a list. (Sort of like the warmblood article...) White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 22:00, 16 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, basically, it was, once, but it was nothing but a list, so someone (probably me) retitled it. The analysis of intermediate smooth gaits is totally covered (or should be) at Ambling gait, and this list could still have a bit of an intro with some sources and still be a list (actually, maybe a candidate for a Featured list if we really wanted to get serious about sources). I guess my own view is to see how much narrative there is to add that we can source and then decide if we have more than an annotated list. I'm cool with adding some general info applicable to all gaited breeds (perhaps the genetics stuff), but the problem, IMHO, is turf: EVERY gaited breed has "the smoothest gait of ANY breed", every gaited breed has a TOTALLY UNIQUE gait that no other gaited breed possibly could have (in spite of the reality that there really are only two forms, diagonal and lateral, and only two ways to do them, synchronous 1-2-3-4 and asynchronous 1-2, 3-4), and so on. Don't mean to be snarky; I actually adored some Paso Finos I got to ride at one point in my life, and my dad owned a lovely half_TWN that had a wonderful running walk, but the breeders, sigh... breathless prose. (FWIW, I also love myth-busting on Arabians, and I own them!!!) I'd say, find sources and go for it, let's see what we can do to improve this before retitling. Montanabw ^(talk) 01:12, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ha, I get a lot of that because I live in the middle of Walker/Racking Horse/Spotted Saddle Horse country and there are a good many Paso Finos and various breeds of Mountain Horses (well, not so many Rocky Mountain Horses, they cost about 3 times what the other breeds do!) around as well. I can find some high quality sources and add a little to the lead. Although one of the funny points about each breed having the SMOOTHEST gait possible is that because of the outcrossing possibilities in the RH, they are combining Walkers with Pasos and then crossing them on Saddlebreds to get flashier movement. Although right now the most popular classes for the Racking Horse are the speed events like this. They are crowdpleasers! White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 02:27, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rocky Mountain "our horses aren't expensive just because they are a purdy color" Horses? LOL! I have heard that they also have races for the Icelandic horses and in Colombia, "largo races" for pasos. I can well imagine the fun! (And, of course, most of these US breeds were basically Thoroughbreds crossed on "local" i.e. Colonial Spanish Horse mares with perhaps a dash of Arab or draft here and there....) Montanabw ^(talk) 02:41, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And the Narragansett Pacer was in the mix too (which undoubtedly, ironically is where the dreaded pace came from). I think I've seen videos of both the Paso and Icelandic races on YouTube too! White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 15:30, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I find the genetic stuff absolutely fascinating; essentially the pace and the lateral gaits probably come from the same (useful) genetic mutation. The trade-off appears to be less ability at the gallop. This totally explains an Arab mare I owned who, late in her life, I realized that she was gaited. (makes sense in retrospect, as she traces to *Raseyn, who was trained as a five-gaited horse) She had a very fast walk, which was excellent on the trail and has lovely soft trot too (did well in dressage, you could sit her extended trot with little effort), but her canter was very rough at best and always a work in progress; she was a lovely jumper but she never really could master a flying change of lead. It was only when she got into her 20s and I occasionally let her "get away" with things did I realize that she could perform the rack. (Long story about how I found out, but let's just say it involved firecrackers on the Fourth of July...) Montanabw ^(talk) 18:57, 21 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I read an article in Equus a while back that said it's theoretically possible to train any horse to rack and that racking was once a part of the high-level dressage training. As for the canter, most gaited horses I've seen don't have a particularly good one, although some are better than others. (Which is probably why they don't make good jumpers, although I did once know a Spotted Saddle Horse that could jump ditches and trail obstacles pretty well). My own horse has a fast walk too, although he's never gaited (the old guy I learned from used to call it the "sloppy dog walk" and said that it was hard to find horses with it. I seriously doubt that's the technical term for it though). White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 00:34, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You can forcibly do so, but there is a clear genetic link in the horses that do it well. Equus sort of lost me when they started worshipping the bad research of Deb Bennett, who seems bound and determined to hold to her old theories from the pre-Horse genome days. (She's a paleontologist by training, when she sticks to conformation she isn't too bad, but her nonsense about how the three foundation sires of the Thoroughbred weren't really of Arabian blood just made me hurl...her case is very poorly stated). Montanabw ^(talk) 05:52, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really care for her conformation things either because I feel like they rely too much on using computers and editing/messing with pictures to "see the conformation". I'd rather use my eyes to judge whether a horse is well built or not, rather than load a picture into the computer and play with it for fifteen minutes or half an hour. (When I bought my horse, I had one and a half hours to decide on him, and wasn't going to waste any time fooling with a computer.) I hadn't heard the non-Arabian thing, but it sounds pretty stupid. My breed books say clearly that they were all three pure Arabians, and as far as I know that's been the belief/fact for the past 300+ years. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 19:25, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

She sets up a lot of straw man arguments. You can't use DNA to determine "breed", only parentage. I've read the actual studies, and basically, they say that the modern Thoroughbred appears to not have common ancestors to (I think) 29 modern Arabians (presumably American ones). Which, frankly, is more than likely; most modern Arabians went through a population bottleneck prior to the Blunt imports to Crabbet; between the wars against the Ottomans (where the Bedouin ran horses into Gatling Guns) and a bad bout of African Horse sickness in the late 1800s, the Arabian was truly an endangered breed in its own homeland. The horses that came to England in the 17th century may have originated in Yemen, Syria, or similar places. (It would be interesting if any of the Arabs tested were y-DNA descendants of the Homer Davenport horses, though). Doesn't mean they weren't pure or close to pure Arabians; it only means that they don't share common parents (the Arabians native to Yemen may now be extinct bloodlines in the purebred Arab, for example).

apperance

Appearance�The most striking feature of the Bashkir Curly is its winter coat which can range from a wavy pattern to tight ringlets over the entire body. The mane is very fine, but also very curly. During the summer the body coat sheds out and the summer coat is often straight, or with just a slight wave. One very unusual feature is that the Bashkir Curly also sheds out its mane and tail, regrowing it again the following winter. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.135.21.195 (talk) 10:40, 10 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]