Breed History

Breed History

              BRITISH APPALOOSA ORIGINS: 


In England, spotted horses can be found illustrating early manuscripts bearing either saints or nobles upon their backs. Charles II had a strangely marked grey with red on his rump named 'Bloody Buttocks'. In the 18th and 19th centuries, one or two spotted horses appeared in English paintings like John Wooton's Lady Conway's Spanish Jennet now in possession of Lord Hertford at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire as pictured below by kind permission. 


Although it is claimed there were indigenous spotted horses in Britain, it is likely that these came originally from the continent. This is thought to be due to the French Cave paintings stated earlier, which geographically speaking, is a close neighbour.


 Up to recent evidence to suggest that spotting patterns have arisen independently anywhere else in the world, it was a viable assumption that the cave dwellers in France were painting something new. As the spread from Southern Europe continued, the spotted horses interbred with native stock and eventually took on conformation appropriate to their new homes.  


(Recent findings, a copy at the bottom of page suggest a link much earlier to Siberia and Eastern Europe)

British horses have more recently experienced a convergence of different spotting lines from around the world, as representatives from America and Danish lines found their way back to our shores.

In augmenting our so-called indigenous stock, Ireland has been a rich source. Ireland also had "native" stock but around the turn of the century came the era of American travelling circuses. There are stories of spotted stallions standing to local mares, which no doubt swelled the native population to good advantage

In the 1970s American stallions were being exported to Australia at regular intervals, using  Britain as a staging post for quarantine reasons. Mare owners were able to secure services to these stallions and hence another important convergence of bloodlines took place. Since then, good American horses have been imported in their own right. 


The Spanish riding school used Appaloosas as far back as 1760 - 

This picture depicts Johann Elias Ridinger riding in 1760 
THE FUTURE

Under the co-ordination of the British Appaloosa Society, this cocktail has formed the basis for a future breed. In 1987 a grading system was implemented, which made provision for a six generation "journey" to stud book status.

Present day, 21st Century now sees our sixth generation horses currently being produced and it is exciting to consider that we are now breeding the first acclaimed pure bred Appaloosa in Britain.

As the future grading towards stud book status progresses the inconsistencies in type and quality of the foundation stock are gradually being smoothed away to produce a superior riding horse - athletic, colourful and willing. A horse of which we can all be proud to say is........................................   A BREED IN THE MAKING !     

Reference Findings
Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art

Abstract
Archaeologists often argue whether Paleolithic works of art, cave paintings in particular, constitute reflections of the natural environment of humans at the time. They also debate the extent to which these paintings actually contain creative artistic expression, reflect the phenotypic variation of the surrounding environment, or focus on rare phenotypes. The famous paintings “The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle,” depicting spotted horses on the walls of a cave in Pech-Merle, France, date back ∼25,000 y, but the coat pattern portrayed in these paintings is remarkably similar to a pattern known as “leopard” in modern horses. We have genotyped nine coat-color loci in 31 predomestic horses from Siberia, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula. Eighteen horses had bay coat color, seven were black, and six shared an allele associated with the leopard complex spotting (LP), representing the only spotted phenotype that has been discovered in wild, predomestic horses thus far. LP was detected in four Pleistocene and two Copper Age samples from Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. In contrast, this phenotype was absent from predomestic Siberian horses. Thus, all horse color phenotypes that seem to be distinguishable in cave paintings have now been found to exist in prehistoric horse populations, suggesting that cave paintings of this species represent remarkably realistic depictions of the animals shown. This finding lends support to hypotheses arguing that cave paintings might have contained less of a symbolic or transcendental connotation than often assumed.
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