BRING ON THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
Weighing in at around 1 tonne and reaching heights of 18hh and more, British heavy horse breeds used to be a common sight in town and country, pulling everything from ploughs and hay carts to milk floats and fire engines. The Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) estimates that there were 2.6m heavy horses working in agriculture and trade at the start of the 20th century, many of them Suffolk Punches, Clydesdales, or Shires and their crosses. But following twoworld wars, mechanisation and the rise of the tractor and van and they all but disappeared.
In 2018, the RBST launched a Heavy Horse Appeal after just 240 Shire, 199 Clydesdale and 25 Suffolk pedigree foals were registered in 2017. They feared that native heavy horse breeds would go extinct.
Today numbers are improving, but all three breeds are on the latest RSBT Watchlist — the Shire and Clydesdale deemed to be ‘at risk’ and the Suffolk in the most endangered category, a ‘priority’ breed.
In 1966, the numbers of purebred
