“Horse-speak” is a seemingly endless lexicon of jargon and terminology referring to anything and everything horse related. The common nomenclature for a horse’s temperament, body type, and color may be accepted generally but is by no means used consistently. Some terms have generalized and become more inclusive. Others in this dizzying array have come to have more restricted meanings. Some have come to do both. The latter is true of the term ‘warmbloods’.
Traditional Classifications
The scientific fact is that all horses, being mammals, are warm blooded. That said, in the horse world the term ‘warm blooded’ (as well as ‘cold blooded’ and ‘hot blooded’) has become a traditional way of categorizing horses sharing certain characteristics of temperament and body type..
Technically, a warmblood is considered a cross between a cold blood and a hot blood. Others would say that if a horse is not cold blooded and it is not hot blooded, then it is warm blooded by process of elimination. Since the traditional lists of cold and hot-blooded breeds are relatively short, if nothing else, this certainly seems to make it easier to remember which are which.
However, still others say that a cold-blooded horse is one that has no Arabian or Oriental blood. This criterion just does not hold as some horses classified as cold blooded in that very short list have been infused over time with Arabian or eastern “hot” blood in order to refine or introduce certain characteristics. According to the traditional definition, that would make these horses warmbloods. But some would argue that in some cases the infusion was insignificant or this breed crossing is difficult to trace.
Now let’s muck this up a bit further. These days in the United States a lot of crossover occurs in the horse world—more than ever before. Just as in the world of music, where opera singers cross over to jazz or even rock music and rock stars pop over now and then into the world of folk music, in the equine world, certain bloodlines of various breeds are coming more into use for work not traditionally their own.
So given all of this mess, what does it mean today to say that a horse is a warmblood? The use of ‘warmblood’ has, of late, become narrower in scope, referring only to a group of sporting horse breeds that are most commonly used for English competition (dressage, hunter/jumper, eventing), as well as combined driving. On the other hand, this term has also become more inclusive and has thus generalized, in a sense, as some breeders today are crossing bloodline restrictions within breed registries to get the best of the best in a sporting horse.
A Different Way of Classifying Horse Breeds
So where does this leave us? The traditional classifications—cold bloods, warmbloods, and hot bloods—leave something to be desired. For example, if we classify or denote the sport horse as a warmblood, where does that leave the light-weight working/stock and performance horses, which are clearly not of the same type as sport horses, yet are also denoted as warmbloods?
Some would suggest a more productive classification system based on body types that lend themselves well to certain kinds of work: brachymorphic, mesomorphic, dolichomorphic, and mesodolichomorphic. These terms are definitely more appropriate and descriptive.
To sum up, the brachymorphic group is typified by heavy working horses; mesomorphic by riding-horses and light workhorses, which can cover “very long distances but do not have great bursts of speed”; and dolichomorphic by the slender eastern horses with high capacity lungs and long legs suited for high speeds. The mesodolichomorphic group, important to this discussion, would cover the sporting horse, who, like the doliochomorph, has long legs, is somewhat slender, but has more stamina, like the brachymorph, and is better suited in the equestrian sports arena.
This nomenclature, then, is a bit more revealing than the traditional. It makes sense that the riding and light work horse be classified separately from the sports horse, not only terms of work, but also in terms of temperament. As any cowboy or cowgirl will say, stock and performance horses are definitely not of the English sort (except, of course, when they crossover to the "English" side).
A Warming Trend
So there it is—everything a horse person ever wanted to know about warmbloods but may have been afraid to ask. Horse people shouldn’t get too comfortable, however. The horse world, like the world around us, is not static. Things may warm up even more as horses and the industry surrounding them continue to evolve.
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