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What is a Hotblood?

Hotbloods are known to be highly sensitive horses with a very well developed sense of awareness, acute eyesight, and very great athleticism and energy.  They are originated from the Arabian horse.  Thoroughbred horses were a derivative of the Arabian horse by infusing them with European cavalry horses, creating the next hotblood breed that were lighter and stronger.  True hotbloods provide greater challenges and rewards for riders, their intelligence and senses enable them to learn things extremely quickly and learn with better communication that their slower more mundane cousins in the coldbloods, however these traits have been carried over to the warmbloods.  Because of their intelligence they can quickly develop bad habits along with good ones, and have a very low tolerance of any poor riders or trainers, as they do know when you are messing up or doing a bad job.

The Arabian hotblood is a horse known for extremely high intelligence, very good stamina, and has a high tail carriage, and ranges in all colors.  It is one of the oldest horse breeds in existence today, and evidence shows that they could be as old as four thousand years.  Throughout the history of the ancient world Arabian horses were used, and bloodlines of Arabian horses are found in almost every warmblood and hotblood alive today.  It was a desert horse, and still is, and in ancient times was highly prized, so prized it was often brought into the tent with the nomads who kept them to keep them safe.  The close relationship with human handler throughout its history has created a good working relationship between the horse and man, much like the dog has become man’s best friend, the Arabian might be man’s best horse.

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What is a Warmblood?

A warmblood is a breed of horse that was manufactured by breeding hotblood war horses with coldblood draft horses.  They are a hybred between the two, strong and large mixed with the small and fast.  The term warmblood originally meant any cross of heavy horse with a Thoroughbred or Arabian horse.  An example of this would be the warmblood Irish Draught Horse.  Today the term refers to a group of sporting horses that have dominated the Olympics and the horse racing industry.  The breeds of warmbloods are the Hanoverian, Oldenburg, Trakhner, Holsteiner, Swedish Warmblood, and Dutch Warmblood.  The warmbloods we see today have often been honed from the earlier warmbloods into breeds that are very well known for athletic jumping abilities, along with showing and good temperaments - their behavior is not as aggressive as hotbloods, while they are not as slow or plodding as coldbloods.

One of the popular horses for Olympic Games is the Hanoverian warmblood horse, which is seen in the English style competitions , and have won gold medals in all three equestrian Olympic competitions.  The Hanoverian is one of the oldest, most numerous, and most awarded of the warmblood horse breeds. It was originally bred and designed as a carriage horse that was dark in color, but then it was inter-bred with the thoroughbred, which lightened it and gave it more agility and ability in competition.  The horse has a good temperment, a great athletic ability, along with being said to be one of the most graceful horses, and one of the most beautiful horses - it stands out as an example of the best warmbloods there are.

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What is a Coldblood?

A coldblood horse is in fact warm blooded, the term coldblood simply means muscular heavy set horses that are bred to be calm, steady, and patient.  Coldbloods are needed to pull plows or heavy carriages, and have been used for hundreds of years for their strength, reliability, and size.  The largest is the Shire, and the Clydesdale.  One of the best know breeds is the Belgian horse, a coldblood that is one of the most widely recognized across the world.  The Shire Horse is a breed of draught horse, or draft horse as it is commonly called in the united states, and it is the tallest of the horse breeds today.  It comes in at higher than 18 hands usually (more than 180CM) and weigh a short ton.  The shire has a rounded body, heavily muscular in its build, and it has powerful legs.  It is a descendant of the medieval Great Horse.

The other two famous coldblood breeds are the Clydesdale and Belgian.  the Belgian coldblood is a horse breed that often stands at nearly 18 hands, with the world record holder being at 19.2 hands, and weighing an full 3,200 pounds.  Usually they never grow larger than 2-2.5k pounds, and are chestnut in color.  The worlds tallest living horse and current record holder for living is Radar, a gelding that was born in Iowa in 1998.  He stands at 19.35 hands, which in feet is six feet and seven inches.  He weighs over 2,400 pounds.  The Clydesdale is another of the famous breeds, and they have been used for three hundred years in industrial and urban settings.  The breed was every common and used all the way into the sixties,.  They are the mascot of several beer brands, seen hauling loads of beer in the commercials.  They stand on average at 18 hands and are usually chestnut with white hooves, and weigh and average of over one ton, or 2,000 pounds.

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What is a Horse Gait?

A horse gait, or gaits, is how a horse moves.  There are several forms of gaits that go from running to walking.  Depending on the command it is given a horse can be trained to shift between these gaits on command (a tapping of the shoe on the side of a horse or the usage of the reigns to slow it down.  Much like shifting through gears on a car). There are two forms of gaits as well - natural gaits that all horses know at birth, and amble gaits that they are taught by humans.

The natural gaits are walking, trotting, canter, gallop, and pace.  The walk is a natural four beat gait that goes about four miles per hour, and is seen in all horses.  When walking the horse follows the 1-2-3-4 sequence, with one foot off the ground and the other three on the ground (except for a small moment when weight transfer occurs), while the horses head will bob up and down for balance.  The trot is a two beat walk that goes about eight miles an hour, about the speed a human can run.  A slow trot is called a jog, while a fast one has no real name.  In this gait, or gear if you think about it in car terms (2nd), the horse moves both diagonal legs at the same time as it moves.  The trot is the normal way for a horse to travel, due to the fact they quickly run out of energy at anything higher.  A horse can maintain a trot for hours, whereas they can only maintain a gallop or canter for a few minutes.  A trot can be somewhat hard for a rider because of the motion going up and down with each beat.  A canter is one step up, going faster but not as fast as a gallop.  A canter is the third fasted natural gait (3rd gear) and the gallop is the fastest (4th gear). There is also the Pace, which is about the same speed as the trot, but is different in that rather than diagonally - the legs on the same side move forward while the others move back.  It can be faster than the trot, and smoother at slower speeds, but becomes very uncomfortable at faster speeds.

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What is a Wild Horse?

The wild horse is the original design of the horse, descended from undomesticated animals who have lived on earth for millions of years.  Today they are extinct in much of the world, and only exist naturally in Asia.  There are only two subspecies of wild horses that survived to modern times due to direct human involvement.  The first is the Tarpan, or Eurasian Wild Horse, and the other is the Mongolian Wild Horse.  The Mongolian Wild Horse was at one point listed as extinct in the wild, but since has been found again and through careful conservation has been brought back from the brink of total obliteration with 1500 in zoos providing the basis of a breeding program for reintroduction into the wild.  As of now there are just over 250 Wild Mongolian Horses in the wild, and the numbers are hopefully going to increase and bring that species of wild horse back to sustainable levels that will insure the species survival.  Wild Horses used to be in nearly every continent, including North America, but were either starved out with climate change - or hunted to extinction.  The Tarpan went extinct completely in 1875.

The Przewalski’s Horse (Mongolian Wild Horse) is the last surviving Wild Horse species in the world, unchanged by inter-breeding with domesticated horses.  It has 66 chromosomes, whereas the domestic horse has 64 - so genetically it is easily identifiable when they are interbred (any interbred horses have 65 chromosomes).  The Mongolian Wild Horse was never domesticated in any form and remains so today.  The Mongolian Wild horse is the only equid species capable of producing fertile offspring with a domesticated horse. Named after Russian General Nikolai Przhevalsky of the Russian army was also a natural explorer, and he found it in 1881, and described it in great detail.  It is through his work that the horse was made well known enough to eventually be kept in zoos while those in the wild died off.

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