By Jean Llewellyn
Graphics: Gemma Alexander

In the past month, we have published our annual Breeding News Worldwide Sport Horse Stallion Directory 2020 – our 16th edition – which includes information for 9,000+ living stallions that are licensed/approved by member studbooks of the WBFSH.

One of the Directory’s regular editorial features focuses on statistical information that is, due to space limitations, presented in a less than ideal pie chart format.
The charts illustrate:
• Geographical Distribution of stallions on a global scale, per birth studbook. We only include those countries whose total represents a significant percentage of the featured stallions. In this case, per previous years, Germany takes the largest piece of the pie at over 45%, followed by France (SF and AA), the Netherlands (KWPN, NRPS), Scandinavia (Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian Warmblood), and Belgium (BWP, sBs, plus Zangersheide). We continue to include Thoroughbreds in our analysis as they are licensed for Warmblood breeding with virtually all the major studbooks, but have no relevance to birth countries.
‘Other’ includes Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, NZ, South Africa, North America, etc., representing virtually every continent that boasts world-class sport horse breeding, but with a much smaller percentage of approved stallions.
Additional pie charts include years of birth, colour, and size across the sport horse stallion spectrum. Although there are small differences from year to year, these are more likely due to the upgrading of information as it becomes available, rather than any specific breeding trends.
For the first time, thanks to Gemma Alexander, we are delighted to present the aforementioned information in graphs that are more representative of global distribution and with geographical comparisons: Stallions by country AND year of birth; Stallions by country of birth AND colour; Stallions by year of birth AND height.
Of course, as always, such statistics can only be viewed based on the information provided, which may not be consistent across the world’s studbooks in terms of their presentation or format. However, we are constantly endeavouring to cross-reference information so it meets the needs of the Directory as well as providing a useful information resource to our breeders.

Please note: The statistics charts below canbe more clearly viewed by going to the online edition of Breeding News at https://breedingnews.com/subscribers-area/