Happy new year, but why is it also happy birthday for horses?

It more or less has been this way since 1834. Not only is Monday the first day of the new year, it is the formal birthday for all horses foaled in the Northern Hemisphere.

Other than saying happy new year and even happy birthday, there is the requisite asking of why this day?

According to Nelson Dunstan’s 1948 story in Daily Racing Form, it used to be May 1. That went as far back as 1751, when some of the earliest rules of racing were published in England.

By the 19th century, 3-year-olds and even 2-year-olds were being raced against more established, older horses. Records of foaling dates were not yet kept reliably, and that came into play when trying to handicap the younger horses.

To address that issue, The Jockey Club based in Newmarket, England, decreed in 1834 that all racehorses under its authority would have Jan. 1 birthdays. It took a while for everyone in England to fall in line, but it finally happened in 1858.

In America, the colonies had asserted their independence. In a preview of coming challenges, though, racing lacked a central authority. That meant the inertia of the existing rules in England carried over to nascent racecourses established in the Northeast, where the New Year’s Day birthday was the regional rule. In the South, however, where allegiances to the old country were resisted, the May 1 policy carried the day.

The flashpoint of the Civil War carried over to racing. After the Union prevailed in 1865, the sport followed suit nationwide and lined up with the New York-centric practice of recognizing Jan. 1 as the equine birthday. It has been that way ever since with the rule in time extending across the hemisphere.

Since the seasons are opposite south of the Equator, horses’ birthdays down there come every Aug. 1. Why it is not July 1 is a whole nuther story to be told.