No matter what month a Thoroughbred horse is born, its birthday is assigned as January 1. (The universal birthday is August 1 in the Southern Hemisphere.) Supposedly, this makes it easier to keep track of Thoroughbred horses' bloodlines, but I cannot see how. The rule was promulgated by the organizations that regulate the Thoroughbred breed
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The actual day a tb is born is recorded on a tb's passport. The rule of being a year older from the 1st January is about racing them, specifically flat racing of 2 and 3 year olds.
In the UK if breeding for the flat racing you will be trying to get your foals born as close to the 1st Jan onwards, as racing them at the very tender age 2 years and 3 years (when they are still growing), the closer to that date gives a bit of an advantage. So the 1st Jan and 1st August dates are about age classification for racing of tb's.
The reason you cannot see how this makes it "supposedly easier to keep track of Thoroughbred bloodlines" is because it has nothing to do with that. The reason for the Jan 1st birthdate is for the racing industry. Races are written for age groups in addition to sex divisions/winner divisions, such as 2 year olds, or 3 year olds or 3 and 4 year olds, or 4 year olds and up. If the race is in January and the horse was born in May, he is still considered eligible for that race, since his "birthday" was Jan. 1st. Pedigrees (thus bloodline information) are kept with the true birthdate on that horse.
Just to add to my previous comment. Although there is incredible (incestious) tight breeding of tbs mainly for flat racing, especially for sprinters and as we know, breeding for the extreme of one thing in a species, in this case "speed." It leads to problems elsewhere fertility, temperament, hoofs to name a couple problems with breeding for "speed."
The General TB Stud Book for tbs run by Weatherbys is interesting. You can take a Welsh Cob mare and put it to a registered tb stallion and register it as a non-tb with them. Technically that animal is then eligible to race against full tbs. If a filly and you then breed again to a tb and so on until the offspring is 15/16 tb, it then goes to full tb passport and is entered on the General TB Stud Book.
A stud I worked on, someone did just that. They brought a Welsh Cob mare to the stud and said, "I want to breed a racehorse from her." Four generations later the Great Great Granddaughter of that mare won a Maiden Point-to-point (amatuer jump racing in uk, which although amatuer, you will have to be training your horse at a professional level to win at these days) race.
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