As promised, some cursed horse breeding information.
To start with, horses start with cursed anatomy. Long weird finger bones holding up their weight on one thick fingernail? Check. Breaths via gut sloshing while running? Check. Literally will die from a broken leg due to high blood pressure? Check. As a result of this, when a horse breaks a leg while running they have to be put down, as they can never actually recover from such an injury. One example of the issues a single broken leg can cause is the story of
Barbaro, a racehorse who shattered its leg during a race and, despite risky surgeries, never recovered and was put down. He wasn't even that badly bred, horses are just
that fragile.
Now, for some reason, people like to take these already weirdly breakable animals and make them worse. Behold, an extremely bred arabian:
The fact that thing is real haunts me. A creepy long neck and weird, dished face. For comparison, a better one:
How about a horse with a nice color but one that looks weird?
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Look at those noodle legs. Technically, this has some bad conformation (weird neck shape, a long back, and back legs aren't ideal). Yes, it was bred like this. Some more bad conformation for you:
A swaybacked pony. Great.
This thing looks like a potato. The knees are too far back and the legs are like posts.
How about horse that would be referred to as downhill, on account of the higher hips to lower front? Plus more post legs.
This one is a good example of a stud ad (remind you of the exotic bullies?). Plus a horse with double muscles and post legs. This thing should be a steak.
The reality is that any animal that can be bred to a weird extreme will be, and dogs and horses are some of the favorites to do this with. Hell, you can argue that mini horses and massive work horses are even weird extremes.
I'll come back with more weird horse stuff (stud ads and whatnot) but I feel this kinda fills in a lot of examples of crappy horses that people have bred.