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Re: [RC] [RC] [RC] [RC] appys - Ed & Wendy Hauser"...claims made by the Spanish Mustang folks are still pie in the sky...." I wish I could remember where I saw that. I don't think it was on the Spanish Mustang website, but it could have been. I just roamed around the site and couldn't find that bit of information. What I remember was that there were some "genetic markers" found in modern Spanish Horses in Spain and that the same "genetic markers" were found in Spanish Mustangs. I don't remember that all Spanish Mustangs were tested, or even that all those tested had the markers. Now I do know that the use of "genetic markers" is a hot area of human research at the moment. There has been a bunch of interesting results that attempt to trace migration routes of paleo humans by looking at frequencies of genetic markers in various populations. It may be that not enough work has been done to ID similar markers in horses, or that some early preliminary work used to be quoted on the Spanish Mustang web site and has since been proven BS and thus removed. Knowing the fanaticism of the Spanish Mustang breeders and owners I have known, I would be somewhat surprised if they removed something just because there are doubts. Frank Hopkins is still quoted on the site. If the results I remember are true, they do not prove that much about Spanish Mustangs. We do know that the genes of Spanish horses was wide spread in the western USA in 1925 when Robert Brislawn and others started collecting horses that they thought looked like they were Spanish. If they selected based on reasonable appearance criteria, they should have obtained foundation stock that contained a lot (a majority? a bunch? quite a bit? some?) Spanish DNA. Many of the descendents of these horses should have markers characteristic of modern horses in Spain. Big deal, we already knew that many horses in the American west are at least partly descended from Spanish horses. Ed Ed & Wendy Hauser 2994 Mittower Road Victor, MT 59875 ranch@xxxxxxxxxxx 406.642.6490 ============================================================ Arabians were bred for years primarily as a war horse and those requirements are similar to what we do today with endurance riding. ~ Homer Saferwiffle ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/ ============================================================
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