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What Is A Thoroughbred Horse

What makes a horse a Thoroughbred? From such a seemingly simple question comes a vast variety of answers. Different authorities in Thoroughbred racing and breeding, in particular the Jockey Clubs of both England and America, have set criteria for determining a pure Thoroughbred. In the Stud Book of 1949, the English Jockey Club said "Any animal claiming admission to the General Stud Book (which 
registers all Thoroughbreds) from now on must be able to prove satisfactorily some eight or nine crosses of pure blood, to trace back for at least a century, and to show such performances
of its immediate family on the turf as to warrant the belief in the purity of its blood."
An American writer put the definition of a Thoroughbred into slightly simpler perspective in 1905 when he said that a Thoroughbred must be "of Oriental extraction and an animal developed through centuries of cultivation by enlightened nations" In both definitions, the ancestry of a horse, and the purity of his family tree, are the primary factors which designate him a Thoroughbred. Careful breeding between select family lines has made the Thoroughbred what he is, and, in fact, every modern registered Thoroughbred can trace his roots back to one of three eighteenth century stallions. Most Thoroughbreds share several physical attributes, including strong, muscular hind quarters, and a high withers. But these attributes cannot designate a horse as a Thoroughbred, as they are not characteristics unique to the breed, nor are they shared by every one of the 50,000 Thoroughbreds foaled each year around the world. It is also impossible to determine a Thoroughbred by the color of his coat, for the Jockey Club recognizes black, dark bay or brown, bay, chestnut, gray, and roan. Romantic chroniclers of the Thoroughbred horse claim that it is the "heart. . .a special combination of competitiveness and determination" that makes a Thoroughbred unique as a breed. However, heart, too, is elusive, so it is in the end only the ancestry of a horse that conclusively makes him a member of that elite racing breed, the Thoroughbred.