There is no single answer, because there is no single registry. Count only breeds with a formal international studbook and you get around 200; the number most encyclopaedias quote is 350–400; Princeton’s field guide Horses of the World illustrates 570; and the UN’s FAO databank logs 618 local breeds. Same animals — four honest numbers. The disagreement is the whole story.

The landrace problem

Most of the gap between "400" and "618" is landraces — local horse populations shaped by a place rather than by a formal breeding programme. A remote valley’s ponies might be genetically distinct, perfectly adapted, and completely undocumented by any international body. Is that a breed, or just "the horses from over there"?

The FAO says yes and counts it; a studbook purist says no. Neither is being careless — they are using different tests. The Australian Stock Horse shows how ordinary this is: the type crossed the continent, carried the Light Horse and worked cattle for well over a century before a society was formed in 1971 to write down what it had been. The paperwork always arrives last.

The Athenian soldier wrote On Horsemanship, the oldest surviving manual on riding and horse care, and its central argument is startlingly modern: anything a horse does under compulsion it does without understanding, and there is no beauty in it — no more than in a dancer driven forward with a whip. Twenty-four centuries later, every decent trainer is still making that same point.

Surtees gave riders the line they still quote at each other: "There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse." He also invented Mr Jorrocks, a fox-hunting Cockney grocer, which suggests he understood both the romance of the thing and its absurdity.

The most-repeated horse saying in English holds that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. It is stencilled on stable walls worldwide and attributed to Churchill on nearly all of them. Churchill scholars have never located it in anything he wrote or said, and near-identical versions were circulating well before his time, often credited to Lord Palmerston. A genuinely good line with a thoroughly unreliable pedigree — which, on a page about breed registries, feels about right.

The most famous horse in Australian writing is the one nobody rated. In The Man from Snowy River, the mountain horse is dismissed as small and weedy, with "a touch of Timor pony" about him — and then goes down the descent no other horse will attempt. Paterson was describing exactly the stock that became the Australian Stock Horse: unimpressive on paper, unbeatable on the country it was bred for.

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• FAO / DAD-IS (Domestic Animal Diversity Information System) — 618 local horse breeds worldwide, as reported by member countries.
• Élise Rousseau & Yann Le Bris, Horses of the World, Princeton University Press (2016) — a field guide to 570 breeds and wild types.
• National Museum of Australia, Phar Lap collection — heart 6.35 kg against 3–4 kg for an average Thoroughbred; hide at Melbourne Museum, skeleton at Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.
• Australian War Memorial — 136,000 walers sent overseas in the First World War, one returned; Sandy’s mounted head and neck are in the Memorial’s collection.
• National Army Museum, Chelsea — skeleton of Marengo, minus two hooves; one mounted as a snuff box for the Brigade of Guards, the other as a silver inkwell.
• American Quarter Horse Association — six million horses registered since 1940; HYPP testing mandatory, with double-copy foals ineligible for registration from 1 January 2007.
• Rare Breeds Survival Trust and The Livestock Conservancy — Clydesdale listed vulnerable/threatened; the Anheuser-Busch breeding programme from 1953 credited as critical to North American survival.
• Xenophon, On Horsemanship (c. 350 BC); R. S. Surtees; A. B. "Banjo" Paterson, The Man from Snowy River (1890).