New boarder has a beautiful horse with a brand with a ‘christmas tree’ on top and 87 below it. I know he was imported. Any info on exactly what the brand means and any additional info on the registry would be great. TIA!
Sure enough sounds like the Thuringen brand. The “87” corresponds to the 3rd and 4th digits from the end of his life number. Thuringia is located in central Germany. The Verband is one of the smaller ones in Germany, at least for breeding sport horses. They have a state stud located at Moritzburg, which, IIRC, was focused for a while on preserving the heavy German horse, but now keeps not only draught stallions, but also warmblood stallions, Haflinger stallions, and (I think) Thoroughbred stallions.
Schwarzwaelder Fuchs horses also have the same “Christmas tree” brand–pretty cool if they are used over a range of types of horses.
Hasn’t Thuringen recently merged with some other registries to form the “Deutsches Sportpferde” registry? Or is that Tubingen?
It is the brand of Thuringia. In the former GDR there was a common warmblood-studbook basing mainly on hannoverian, Trakehner and thoroughbred bloodlines. After 1990 and the reunification this studbook was split into 5 different studbooks: Mecklenburger, Brandenburger, Sachsen-Anhaltiner, Sachse and Thueringer. For this were only studbooks with limited numbers of registered Mares and foals, the registries chose to merge. In 2003 the new studbook “Deutsches Sportpferd” (= German Sporthorse) was found on the Basis of the warmbloods of Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Sachsen and Thueringen. Since 2006 all warmblood foals get the traditional brand of an arrow and a snake (www.pzvba.de look to the left upper Corner). If your horse has the Christmas Tree, ist is born before 2006 and is a Thueringer Warmblood.
Thanks Adela!
This is pretty fascinating stuff, and I figured only on COTH would I find someone with this kind of knowledge. I will pass this information on to the owner. He did do some online research, but told me everything he ended up with was in German, so he couldn’t get much out of it.
His horse (Hugo) is the classical ‘hunter’ type. Beautiful. Gelding he thinks between 13-16 yo. If he was interested, would there be a way for him to find out more on his horse’s breeding/papers?
