Our native ponies are admired worldwide but how are they doing?

Rare Breeds Survival Trust Chief Executive Christopher Price gives an update on their populations

- By Christopher Price

The UK's fantastic native horse and pony breeds display their unique characteristics and talents on smallholdings throughout the UK. Many of these breeds are now rare, and RBST is working with breed societies, conservationists and owners throughout the UK to get these breeds back into stable positions.

Our latest Watchlist for rare livestock and equine breeds, based on analysis of genetic diversity within each breed as well as breeding female registrations, shows welcome improvements for several of the UK's rare native horse and pony breeds.

The Fell Pony saw over 50 more dams recorded as producing registered progeny in 2024, a 23% increase on the previous year and the highest recorded figure for the breed since 2010.

There was a positive 14% increase in the number of dams for the Dartmoor Pony breed, which also saw an improvement in 'Effective Population Size' (which is a measure of genetic diversity and does not equate to the total breed population).

The data for the Welsh Section B Pony indicates a stabilisation of the breed's decline, a positive step in the efforts to halt and reverse the Section B's downwards trend which saw the breed added to our Watchlist in 2024.

There is an important improvement too for the Eriskay pony, although the breed is still operating at very low numbers and remains in the Watchlist's Priority category. Similarly, while the Cleveland Bay Horse and the Suffolk Punch both remain in the Priority category too, both breeds showed welcome signs of stability in breed and registered birth numbers last year.