Spanish ancestry
North American domestics with old Spanish ancestry:
  • Saddle-bred, Tennessee walker
  • Results of cross between European and Spanish bred horse
  • Many horses came from Carribean to New England which was the centre of horse breeding for a long time
Estimate 3,000 North American horses with old Spanish origins
  • about 100 in Canada.
Chilcotin horses in B.C.
  • Spanish ancestors may have come up from Mexico
  • only takes one individual to get Spanish variant into population
  • transferrin variant is quite rare — Cothran tested hundreds of thousands of horses — 120 breeds and 100 different wild populations — only saw that marker a few times