Information about Thoroughrbeds, Thoroughbred Pictures, and Thoroughbreds for sale.

Thoroughbred Horses
The Thoroughbred is a horse breed best known as a race horse. While carefully bred racehorses had existed throughout Europe for centuries prior to this time, the breed as it is known today developed during the 17th century in England when English mares, began to be were bred to imported Arabian stallions. This addition of verifiable Arabian blood coincided with the creation of the General Stud Book of England and the practice of official registering of horses. Today all modern Thoroughbreds trace to these imported stallions.

Thoroughbreds are bought and sold for millions of dollars and the thoroughbred industry is worth billions to the economy of the United States and particularly to states like Kentucky where the thoroughbred is one of the main agricultural resources.

Thoroughbred Horse Characteristics
The typical Thoroughbred stands 16 hands (64 inches) high, and is bay, brown, chestnut, black, gray or roan in color. The face and lower legs may be marked with white, but white will generally not appear on the body (although certain color genes, possibly the rabicano or sabino genes, result in white hairs and white patches in the coat.

A horse cannot be registered as a Thoroughbred unless it is conceived by "live cover;" that is, by the natural mating of a mare and a stallion. Artificial insemination, though prevalent in other large animal breeding operations, cannot be used. Originally this was because DNA testing had not yet developed to a degree adequate to verify parentage, but today the reasons may be more economic: a stallion has a limited number of mares who can be serviced by live cover.

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