Many of the foals bred on the Forest are sold through the Beaulieu Road pony sales, which are held several times each year.

The New Forest pony has free, even gaits, active and straight, but not exaggerated, and is noted for sure-footedness, agility, and speed.

Few coat colours are excluded: piebald, skewbald, and blue-eyed cream are not allowed; palomino and very light chestnut are only accepted by the stud book as geldings and mares.

[2] Ponies failing to pass these standards may not be registered in the purebred section of the stud book, but are recorded in the appendix, known as the X-register.

DNA sequencing revealed that the affected foal was homozygous for a missense mutation in the gene encoding CLCN1, a protein which regulates the excitability of the skeletal muscle.

The researchers concluded that the condition has an autosomal recessive mode of inheritance, whereby both parents have to contribute the mutated allele for a physically affected foal to be produced with that phenotype.

[10] Spear damage on a horse shoulder bone discovered at Eartham Pit, Boxgrove (about 50 miles (80 km) from the heart of the modern New Forest), dated 500,000 BC, demonstrates that early humans were hunting horses in the area at that time,[11] and the remains of a large Ice Age hunting camp have been found close to Ringwood (on the western border of the modern New Forest).

William the Conqueror, who claimed the New Forest as a royal hunting ground,[16] shipped more than two thousand horses across the English Channel when he invaded England in 1066.

[17][18] The earliest written record of horses in the New Forest dates back to that time, when rights of common of pasture were granted to the area's inhabitants.

[21][22] The most notable stallion in the early history of the breed was a Thoroughbred named Marske, the sire of Eclipse, and a great-grandson of the Darley Arabian.

[23] Marske was sold to a Ringwood farmer for 20 guineas on the death of Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, and was used to breed with "country mares" in the 1760s.

New Forest ponies have been exported to many parts of the world, including Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Australia,[26] and many countries now have their own breed societies and stud books.

[25] Today the New Forest pony and related crossbreeds are still the "working pony of choice" for local farmers and commoners, as their sure-footedness, agility, and sound sense will carry them (and their rider) safely across the varied and occasionally hazardous terrain of the open Forest, sometimes at great speed, during the autumn drifts.

[37] The cattle and ponies living on the New Forest are not completely feral, but are owned by commoners, who pay an annual fee for each animal turned out.

The Verderers are a statutory body with ancient roots, who share management of the forest with the Forestry Commission and National park authority.

For much of the year the ponies live in small groups, usually consisting of an older mare, her daughters, and their foals, all keeping to a discrete area of the Forest called a "haunt."

They normally are turned out only for a limited period in the spring and summer, when they gather several groups of mares and youngstock into larger herds and defend them against other stallions.

This ensures that foals are born neither too early (before the spring grass is coming through), nor too late (as the colder weather is setting in and the grazing and browsing on the Forest is dying back) in the following year.

[42] The stallion scheme resulted in a reduction of genetic diversity in the ponies running out on the New Forest, and to counteract this and preserve the hardiness of Forest-run ponies, the Verderers introduced the Bloodline Diversity Project, which will use hardy Forest-run mares, mostly over eleven years old, bred to stallions that have not been run out on the Forest, or closely related to those that have.

[47] Animals surplus to their owner's requirements often are sold at the Beaulieu Road Pony Sales, run by the New Forest Livestock Society.

[38] The rest of the year, the lives of the ponies are relatively unhindered unless they need veterinary attention or additional feeding, when they are usually taken off the Forest.

[54][55] The races do not have a fixed course, but instead are run across the open Forest, so competitors choose their own routes around obstructions such as inclosures (forestry plantations), fenced paddocks, and bogs.