Horse Breeds and Human Society

Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse

Kristen Guest, Monica Mattfeld, Kristen Guest, Monica Mattfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429656927
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book demonstrates how horse breeding is entwined with human societies and identities. It explores issues of lineage, purity, and status by exploring interconnections between animals and humans.

The quest for purity in equine breed reflects and evolves alongside human subjectivity shaped by categories of race, gender, class, region, and nation. Focusing on various horse breeds, from the Chincoteague Pony to Brazilian Crioulo and the Arabian horse, each chapter in this collection considers how human and animal identities are shaped by practices of breeding and categorizing domesticated animals.

Bringing together different historical, geographical, and disciplinary perspectives, this book will appeal to academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students, in the fields of human-animal studies, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, history, and literature.

Part I

Before breed

Historical contexts for an emerging discourse

1 Defining “race” in the Spanish horse

The breeding program of King Philip II

Kathryn Renton

Introduction

The name of the contemporary Spanish horse breed known as the Pura Raza Español makes evident an implicit association between the ideas of purity (pura) and breed (raza). Promoted by the ANCCE (Asociación Nacional de Criadores de Caballos de Pura Raza Española) since 1972, the PRE is a mid-sized horse with a compact frame, elevated gait, and a docile and responsive temperament (Figure 1.1). While at present a popular sport horse, the PRE also belongs to a category of so-called “baroque” horses with ties to earlier centuries’ use by European noblemen for riding and warfare. Despite common agreement on the historic presence of native horse populations in the Iberian Peninsula, the breed itself has debated points of origins: some enthusiasts claim pure ancestry from Iberian stock, others point to the role of medieval Carthusian monks in preserving a special strain of horses, and still others to a major initiative developed by the Habsburg King, Philip II, in the mid-sixteenth century to improve the horse in Spain.¹

Figure 1.1 “Panadera LVIII, Campeona del Mundo 2017, de Mª Fernanda de la Escalera de la Escalera”, Campeones SICAB, Asociación Nacional de Criadores de Caballos de Pura Raza Española 2018, www.ancce.es/fotos/campeones-sicab/

Source: Courtesy of ANCCE.

Taken together, origin stories for this Spanish horse breed emphasize blood purity. The notion that a native Iberian horse remained unchanged for more than a millennium stresses inherent adaptive traits in the horse population over the influence of multiple forms of human intervention. Likewise, the claim that Carthusian monks preserved isolated strains of Iberian horse lineages idealizes the preservation of specific bloodlines. Even pointing to the initiative of Philip II to improve horse breeding in Spain in the 1560s, which resulted in the founding of a new Royal Stud in Cordoba suggests an understanding of breed using methodical selection to build an exclusive lineage. However, the task of recovering a horse’s historical physical type, its relationship to pre-modern terminology, and actual records of breeding proves exceedingly elusive and raises innumerable questions about the historical legacies assigned by modern breeds.

Historically speaking, where does interest in breed as a form of purity originate? Scholars of animal studies have examined the concept of breed as regulation and control over animal bodies in animal husbandry, a line of thought adopted by researchers interested in the development of racial terminology. According to this scholarship, animal race is defined as an essentializing and exclusionary power relationship that is reproduced in human social relations.² Yet, cultural anxieties and desires to apply essentializing categories intersected with the constraints of practice and experience with real animal bodies. Requirements for breeding animals with socially desirable qualities did not conform necessarily to expected doctrines of status or lineage, as this analysis of the horse in Spain will emphasize.

Re-examining archival records surrounding the initiative of Philip II to improve the Spanish horse allows for a better understanding of race in the context of Spanish equine husbandry. These documents demonstrate interest in horse breeding as a form of government regulation in both municipal and royal registers, but they also reveal insight into local breeding practices and criticisms from noblemen. Raza emerges in these documents as a term with new legal importance in the 1560s for improving the Spanish horse. However, raza primarily appears as a type constructed through selection and crossbreeding, rather than a statement of purity achieved through inbreeding or breed registry. Contrasts between the king’s initiative and the responses generated from local breeders led the king to institutionalize crossbreeding in his stock improvement program. Criticism of the king’s program by Spanish nobility highlights the context-dependent definition of race, which in turn challenges the notion that essentializing racial concepts emerge directly from practical application in animal husbandry. Instead, this episode illustrates the fluidity of categories of breed and race in the early modern period.

Raza and race in the Iberian Peninsula

Animal studies scholarship has emphasized the regulation of the animal body as an important component of the development of political authority and socially exclusionary boundaries that might deploy notions of purity. The work of Harriet Ritvo led the way in documenting the development of one of the first breed catalogues for cattle in England, and other scholars have likewise demonstrated the association of breed books with elite social practices. Among the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century, animal breeds grew from arbitrary pedigree standards for pure blood or pure breed animals.³ In this sense, breed generated claims to purity with significant social repercussions, embodying relationships of power.

Modern breed categories continue to emphasize breed purity in terms of lineage and registries, even though scientifically such definitions of breed as exclusionary categories suffer from similar social fallacies as modern definitions of race. In the science relating to the breeding and domestication of animals, a domesticated animal breed is considered a subspecies, similar to a human race.⁴ The Spanish designation, raza, likewise signals “a subdivision within a domestic species.”⁵ Within each type of “sub-racial” category, a genetic lineage might define the raza based on the exhibition of inherited traits transmitted from one generation to the next with varying degrees of persistence.⁶ On the other hand, these distinctions are by no means fixed or genetically distinct from other subspecies, and a particular phenotype might also be selected from a given population without strictly following a specific genetic line.

Various studies have rooted the lexicon of race in animal husbandry in multiple Romance languages, and this point of origin has subsequently been incorporated into larger arguments about the meaning of lineage, blood, and purity. From Norman- Italian roots in the thirteenth century, the term began to circulate in the Iberian context in the fifteenth century, first in relation to an equine disease and later in relation to horses and people.⁷ Medievalist David Nirenberg points out that the term raza or race emerged in the Spanish language in reference to horse’s veterinary care and breeding in the fifteenth century, at the same time that it was applied to the Jewish population – a convergence which he took to mean that the term raza was “already embedded in identifiably biological ideas about animal breeding and reproduction.”⁸ Likewise, Javier Irigoyen-Garcia, examining the breeding of sheep in the Iberian Peninsula, traces the word race and its use to a different strain of animal husbandry, Merino sheep. Irigoyen-Garcia suggested slippage between zoological and ethnocentric language, facilitated by the use of the term in the context of animal breeding, where mixtures of indigenous Iberian and North African Rams in Al-Andalus were re-defined as purely Spanish.⁹ By connecting animal breeding to ideas of race, these scholars imply that animal breeding itself established a physical logic across generations – one that was derived practically, if not yet scientifically, from animal husbandry – and could be applied in socially exclusionary practices.

An example of this convergence is often offered in the historical dictionary of Covarrubias and his well-known definition of raza. Written in 1611, the dictionary listed three distinct definitions of the term for race, bridging horse and human populations.¹⁰ The first referred to the “purest” horses whose quality was known by their brand. The second referred to the hidden thread of the weft, differently coloured from the visible threads of the warp. The third referred to the prejudicial effects of lineages like that of the Muslim or Jew. Thus, raza referred simultaneously to the contaminated qualities of Jewish or Moorish ancestry and to the very best horses. Yet, the convergence here between animal and human populations need not be understood as causal.

A transfer of terminology from animal husbandry to human populations confirms that broader conceptual issues framing generation, reproduction and heredity were shared in both realms. However, it remains an open question whether concepts like race exist independently of a particular lexicon and the historical contingency of semantics.¹¹ For this reason, it is crucial to examine the use-acquired meanings of typologies in animal husbandry practices and their relationship to the formation of knowledge. Practices of animal breeding generate knowledge subject to environmental and practical variations, and horse breeding is an important site where social authority intersects with experience of animal bodies.

The project of Philip II to improve the Spanish horse represents a multi-faceted set of documentation, including decrees issued by the monarchy, reports collected in response to a centralized survey, and the king’s own instructions for founding a new royal breeding stud, as well as criticisms of his program overall. Strikingly, these sources lack emphasis on exclusion and purity, instead centering on the benefits of crossbreeding. The following analysis, first of the survey and second of the king’s breedin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Horse breeds: introduction
• Part I Before breed: historical contexts for an emerging discourse
• Part II Breed and national/regional identity
• Part III Wild horses and the politics of breed
• Part IV Purity and evolution: breed standards and breed organizations
• Index