Talk:Basque Mountain Horse

Merge
Putting on the merge tag as "Basque pony" is linked to the Pottok article. I'm not making the argument for these being one or two breeds, but merely wanting to be sure that we don't have separate articles on the same thing. If they are separate, then maybe edit both articles to explain this and cross-link them for ease of readers. Montanabw (talk) 04:27, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah I answered on the Pottoka page. They are two breeds, I just haven't had time to expand this one. You're right, they used to be a bit of a mess but at the moment, there are no duplicates as far as I can tell. Akerbeltz (talk) 14:59, 5 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, Basque Pony redirects to Pottok, so which breed is it? :-D   Montanabw (talk) 22:20, 5 April 2011 (UTC)


 * When I came to these Basque horse pages, it was clear from the content that Basque Pony and Pottoka were about the same horse; it's also a name commonly found in English for the Pottoka, not the Basque Mountain Horse (which isn't really bred outside the BC). So while there might be some overlap, I'd say it's not significant. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:02, 5 April 2011 (UTC)


 * OK, maybe we need a dab to avoid confusion.  At one time we had three different articles on the Pottok too, all with different spellings!  =:-O   Montanabw (talk) 18:59, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Good move. Yes, I remember that. Pity we ended up with Pottok rather than Pottoka but I'm a great believer in leaving well alone! Akerbeltz (talk) 19:26, 6 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, one of the other spellings was Pottock, so really, it could be worse! LOL!   Montanabw (talk) 18:37, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Not a breed
This is not a breed, it's a landrace. Where is the studbook? Where is a breed registry organization? Not a breed. Members of the equine project really need to wrap their heads around the difference, even though your preferred sources rarely bother to do so themselves. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:07, 7 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Please read horse breed. The issue of the line between a landrace and a breed needs to be discussed project wide. Why not take the issue to WikiPRoject Equine, and provide us your outstanding source material to prove you are correct? I'm not being unreasonable here, I'm asking for a true discussion not a scattered one.   Montanabw (talk)  22:37, 7 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a reliable source for itself. The line between a landrace and breed is not a wikiproject matter, it's a factual matter independent of any particular type of animal. A domestic animal population either has strictly controlled breeding or it does not.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:55, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

This abstract of a genetic study seems to be the source of the idea of four closely related strains (an idea repeated with insufficient clarity at sites like []), and names them "the pottokas, the Basque mountain pony, the Jaca Navarra and the Burguete breed". Those last two are formal breeds with extensive out-crossing to larger breeds from elsewhere. The genetic data showed that those two are closely related to each other, and that the populations they label pottoka and Basque mountain pony are in turn closely related to one another. But that's as far as that material goes. The comment at this piece that the "native breeds usually run wild" and breed indiscriminately suggests that it's addressing the Basque mountain pony as a landrace, not a formal breed; but how it's supposedly distinguishable from the pottoka isn't clear. This short paper also distinguishes between them, but it is unclear how. Virtually none of these sorts of sources, not even the Spanish government work cited in our stub already, make any distinction between landraces and formal breeds. In Spanish, the word is simply raza regardless, and it tends to get translated as "breed" in this context whether it really qualifies or not. I.e. the "it's really a breed because this source used that word" is WP:original research and undue weight, an attempt to foist significant meaning onto passages that are not actually conveying the interpretation one wished they were. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:55, 7 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Here's the deal: This whole discussion needs to go to WikiProject Equine, as there are many articles possibly affected. The line between a "landrace" and a "breed" is a highly controversial concept in the first place, thus your own view is equally OR - for example the Andalusian horse one of the oldest recorded breeds in Spain, is also called "raza", and if it's not a breed, nothing is! (If you can't trust Carthusian monks, who can you trust?)  I was talking to a biology editor a while ago, who commented that "landrace" itself is a relatively newfangled notion on the scene.  All "wild" horses are actually feral, save for the Przewalski's horse, so the situation is further complicated. Add to that the semi-feral animals where there is a lot of human intervention, even if not obvious.  Then we also have some people who argue that breeds with an open stud book might not be "breeds" at all, but they sure aren't landraces, and so and you can see this is not a simple situation. At horse breed, we looked at source material and decided that a broad definition was best, given the huge range of situations in front of us. I'm NOT arguing for the article as a source, but as an illustration of how the definition came to be.��  Montanabw (talk)  04:50, 8 June 2014 (UTC)