Pedigree-Based Description of Three Traditional Hungarian Horse Breeds

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The most important purpose of animal conservation programs is to maintain genetic variability. The Furioso-North Star, the Gidran, and the Nonius are indigenous Hungarian horse breeds from the Mezőhegyes Stud. In the last century, the role of the horses was changed, the technical innovations and motorization replaced them, so the population size and the genetic variability of these breeds were reduced. Nowadays these breeds are endangered. The aims of this study were to give information about the current breeding population and support breeder associations during their gene conservation work. The pedigree quality, generation intervals, probability of gene origin, and inbreeding were evaluated. We found that breeds had a large bottleneck effect during breeding history. The level of inbreeding was measured with different methods, such as Ballou’s, Wright’s, and Kalinowski’s coefficient. Most of the current inbreeding coefficient was the result of previously fixed alleles for each breed. Effective population size was also estimated, and the status of the breeds was found to be not critical according to FAO criteria. ABSTRACT: The Mezőhegyes Stud was founded in 1784 where three different horse breeds were developed: the Furioso-North Star, the Gidran, and the Nonius. These breeds were based on the same mare population, but each breed had different utilization purposes. Our aim was to analyze the pedigree information of these three indigenous breeds. The genealogical information was traced back from the actual breeding population back to the founder animals, and the final database contained more than 47,000 horses. The reference populations were defined as the registered breeding animals in 2019. The complete generation equivalent was 16.45 for the Gidran breed, 15.18 for Furioso-North Star, and 12.64 for Nonius, respectively. Due to the utilization of English Thoroughbred during the breeding history, the average maximum generations were close to 36 generations for each breed. The average relatedness was approximately 4%. The average Wright’s inbreeding coefficient was the highest for the Nonius breed (5.59%). Kalinowski’s decomposition of inbreeding showed that inbreeding is originated mainly from the past; the current fixation of alleles was higher for the Nonius horse breed. There was a reasonable bottleneck effect for each breed. The estimated effective population sizes suggest that there is no problem with the maintaining of Mezőhegyes horse breeds.