Australian Riding Pony
An Australian Riding Pony is a beautiful youth horse of the Welsh pony type with a height of around 130 cm. This pony is often gray , but also brown, fox and dun. It has a particularly neat head with small ears, large eyes and a concave nose line, a well curved, strong neck, a good shoulder and little instep. The trunk is compact, the legs strong with hard hooves and few curtains. Slightly sloping croup, more rarely straight and short. Good action in all three gaits, jumping ability.
The Australian Riding Pony is the ideal riding and driving horse for young people or light adults.
There are only studs in Australia and New Zealand where the Australian riding pony is bred, in Australia in the states of New South Wales , Queensland and Victoria .
history
The beginnings of pony breeding on the fifth continent are not known. With the first English settlers, their (small) workhorses were almost certainly also gradually arriving here. The first thoroughbred stallion set foot on Australian soil in 1802, the first Timor stallion in 1803. The two animals were heavily used. Further imports, especially of Welsh ponies and cobs, but also Arabs and many Indonesian ponies followed. By around 1880, some studs had established themselves that, in addition to the popular Timors, also bred Shetland, Welsh and, interestingly, Hungarian ponies. The latter are likely to have been small European horses, possibly from the Carpathian Mountains . Stallions of the Exmoor and Hackney breeds were also used. From this colorful mixture of races, a consolidated race developed through careful selection and increased use of Welsh blood. In 1931 the Australian riding pony was recognized as such and a stud book was created. Today the ponies are used for sport or kept on farms as sturdy riding horses.
literature
- Peter Huntington, Jane Myers, Elizabeth Owens: Horse Sense: The Guide to Horse Care in Australia and New Zealand. Land Links, Collingwood, Vic. 2004, ISBN 0643065989 , here p. 86.
