Mountain Pleasure Horse/Appalachian Purebred Gaited Horse - Kentucky, USA
EST Status: CRITICAL
Originally just called "mountain horses" or "saddlers", this 200 year old gaited breed was developed in the remote Eastern Kentucky Appalachian Mountains around the time of Kentucky's early statehood. Settlers and farmers used these horses for working their small hillside farms, riding the steep mountain trails to hunt for food, visit neighbors and make trips town for supplies or for Church on Sundays. 

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Recent Mountain Pleasure Horse DNA studies have placed the breed as an ancestral contributor to a host of other breeds: the American Saddlebred, Tennessee Walking Horse, and its close cousin the Rocky Mountain Horse. Naturally gaited, the breed is born with a four-beat lateral gait with no exaggerated movement, allowing horse and rider a surefooted, ground covering gait useful on the steep trails of its homeland. This gait is often referred to as the "Cadillac of Rides".

 

Today's Mountain Pleasure breeders pride themselves on maintaining a great family horse used for pleasure, being second to none on the trail. The most common color of the Mountain Pleasure is palomino; however they come in several shades of color including: chestnut, black, bay, buckskin, cremello, perlino, and grey with some spotted combinations accepted as well.  

 

Current global populations of the Mountain Pleasure Horse hover around 2500, with approximately 1700 of those in the state of Kentucky.

 

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