Genetics has not been a usual academic pursuit in the study of horses. Nutrition, exercise physiology and veterinary topics related to infectious diseases or mechanical defects are more traditional scientific pursuits. Genetics has been left to the realm of horse breeders. Indeed, horse breeders are historically credited with being the leading practitioners of the art and certainly have the longest pedigree records including the Weatherby Studbook and the oral tradition of Arabian horse breeding.

On the other hand, modern animal breeder need not yield ground in the area of genetics to horse breeders. Rightfully, our quantitative geneticists can point to the remarkable genetic gains and genetic predictions that have been made with Dairy cattle and since the 1940s,... without benefit of molecular biology!