Breed All About It! Equiery Reader Breed Survey Results

While foal photos kept rolling in representing a diversity of horse and pony breeds, The Equiery wanted to know what is the most popular horse or pony breed among our readers! We put out a survey through Facebook and email in early July asking our readers to tell us a bit about their horses. In just a few days, over 200 readers took our survey, making for some interesting results!

Although the majority of our survey participants are Maryland residents, our survey reached far past the Maryland border with responses from Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Delaware, New Jersey and New York.

Here is just a sampling of what we learned from the survey participants.

Our 234 survey participants own a total of 712 horses representing 77 different breeds. Twelve of those breeds were crosses. In some cases, “miscellaneous” was used as the breed if the owner did not know the breed or listed a miscellaneous cross.

Overall, our Top 10 most popular breeds were:
1. Thoroughbred (22.10%)
2. Quarter Horse (10.81%)
3. Morgan (4.50%)
4. Arabian (4.40%)
5. Paint (4.21%)
6. Draft Cross (3.80%)
7. Thoroughbred Cross (3.70%)
8. Appaloosa (3.23%)
9. Appendix (2.95%)
10. Standardbred (2.25%)

Outside of the most popular breeds, we had quite a few unique and rare breeds represented in the group. Some of these included Azteca, Icelandic Horse, Walkaloosa, Drum Horse, Sachsen-Anhaltiner, Cleveland Bay, Lipizzan, Georgian Grande, Gypsy Vanner and Canadian Horse.

But we did not just want to know what breeds our readers own. We also asked about what they use their horses for. Our readers use their horses for a wide variety of things from trail riding, to competitions to ranch work and more! Here are the most popular uses of the top five horse breeds in our survey.

Thoroughbred
1. Companion (25.50%)
2. Eventing (21.70%)
3. Hunter/Jumper (13.40%)

Quarter Horse
1. Trail (26.00%)
2. Pleasure Riding (16.90%)
3. Companion (14.30%)

Morgan
1. Trail (37.50%)
2. Pleasure Riding (25.00%)
3. Driving (21.90%)

Arabian
1. Trail (38.70%)
2. Pleasure Riding (22.60%)
3. Companion (19.40%)

Paint
1. Trail (43.30%)
2. Pleasure Riding (16.70%)
3. Companion (13.30%)

In addition, we also asked our readers if any of the horses they own were bred here in Maryland. Survey results showed that 175 horses were Maryland-bred, which is about 25% of the horses listed in the survey. The breeds with the highest number of horses bred in Maryland were: