Ever since setting hoof on American soil, the horse bred by the Gypsy/Romany people has had an ongoing identity crisis. Not from the horse’s perspective, because they know who and what they are, but from their human owners’ perspectives.
What is a Gypsy Horse? What is a Gypsy Vanner Horse? What is the authoritative source on what is what? Who or what gets to control that?
I enjoy the Gypsy Vanner Horse Breed vision for what it is. It’s a vision of a breed of horses out of a slice of time post-World War II to the late 20th century when they were first introduced to the Americas.
I likewise enjoy the Gypsy Horse that exists from the mid-1800s when the Gypsy/Romany people began using horses to pull their iconic homes called vardos. Gypsy Horses were for utility first.
What the horses were originally even prior to all of this is what nature brought to mankind.
What man has done with the horse can be seen as nothing less than art.
The Gypsy Vanner Horse Society was started based upon a beautiful vision.
I feel that this vision alone was not self-sustaining, and because of that, money had to be involved. When money gets involved, therein lies trouble.
To sustain a registry, you need people interested in the breed. To maintain that registry, you need horses to be registered and you need members that pay membership dues. When you have disparate horses of varying characteristics applying to be registered, you then must make determinations about qualifications. Once qualifications are drawn up, there is constant pressure to widen those qualifications to engender additional interest, participation, and registrations/transfers/memberships (where the money comes from).
One side struggles to open up the qualifications so that greater participation can be achieved to feed funds into the registry for the long-term survival of the registry and its activities. The other side struggles to isolate the qualifications as tightly as possible to have a hold on the commodity that is the horse breed itself so as to maintain control of a scarce resource either due to pride, selfishness, greed, or, in some circumstances, well-meaning idealism that is blind to how this could choke out the registry, and therefore, its mere existence, and eventually, the vision of the breed itself.
Lost in the middle is the person that just truly cares about the horses themselves and has a high appreciation for their unique identifying characteristics within the sea of other horse breeds.
I posit that science can intervene to help de-mystify some of the romantic past.
A pictorial representation of the known genome of all available horses can be created.
It is a striking representation of all equines and, as well, the little arms seem to indicate selective breeding by mankind and, also, generations of horses breeding in isolation.
Several things of interest can be seen in this diagram based upon DNA.
At the tippy top of the diagram, you find Thoroughbred Horses.
On the far, upper right arm, you see Spanish breed horses.
On the lower right-hand leg, you have North Seas pony breeds.
On the lower left-hand leg, you find Clydesdales and Shires.
That little red/orange head in the top middle, is where the Arabians lie (somewhat near relatives of Thoroughbreds since they were used in the early breeding of Thoroughbreds and not too far from Spanish horses which speaks volumes about human history over the Straits of Gibraltar).
What is the center in this diagram? That is the realm of the more natural, mixed-breed horses, and there lies very heavy American Mustang bloodlines at the heart of horsedom.
Where does that leave the Gypsy Horses in the diagram? They are stretched out toward Clydesdale and Shire bloodlines. To the upper right is Fell Ponies (tan). The green in the diagram below is the DNA territory of all Gypsy Horses.
Ancestry DNA testing of my Gypsy Horses shows that an average of 37.5% of their genetics comes from Clydesdale/Shire Horses (roughly 3 out of 8 progenitor horses). On average, another 20% or so comes from smaller horses like Fell Ponies and North Sea Pony breeds. Other European Heavy Horses and draft horses are well-represented in their DNA, and the rest is a mix of many, many equine DNA sources. I even have a few that have smatterings of Arabian and AkhalTeke blood.
Scientifically, we can show that Gypsy Horses and only Gypsy Horses lie in that zone between Fell Ponies and Shires (on the other side of the Fell Ponies is the DNA home of Friesians making them also a close cousin). Gypsy Horses are distinct and separate from all other horse breeds genetically.
We have the technology now for science to tell us what is and what is not a Gypsy Horse, which are genetically indistinguishable from Gypsy Vanner Horses. They may not be of the same exact type according to the vision for the new breed, but they are the same breed beneath all that hair.
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