I stumbled, on DeviantART, across the work of some fellow called Ryofuko-Chan, who has produced some photoshopped images of horses reimagined as My Little Pony characters. It's perhaps not the best Photo Shop work, but it's interesting nonetheless.

I fault these mainly because most of them do not appear to be pony breeds. Something more resembling the proportions . . . vaguely resembling, of course . . . of the cartoon characters, might have been more appropriate for this exercise.

Here's a link.

Here are some samples:

It's always so strange to see actual horse proportions. Our Little Ponies are really not very equine at all, and I think we've become indoctrinated or something.

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Well, compare the proportions of humans and various other primates. I imagine that when compared to extant equinoids, ponies would seem similarly distorted. Similar, but still markedly different.

I know as a past lover of the MLP gens Seeing the new ones did really weird me out at first. I was much more used to well, more equine ponies and these ones were a slight shock.

I have a few friends who feel the same and haven't gotten into MLPFIM as a result.

Part of me wonders what it would look like to have a chart shifting from real life equines to our ponies. Akin to the human to equine chart that went around for a while during anthro discussions.

I'd also like to see something like this applied to specific horse breeds or even pony breeds. Dotted Line comes to mind for a shetland....

There's also a couple of images by mistysteel:

http://mistysteel.deviantart.com/art/Derpy-x-Doctor-Whooves-376321477

See image's description for more.

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I'm not an expert on horse breeds, but I think none of the examples above are actually ponies. There are, of course, pony and miniature breeds that are much shorter and stockier and resemble the cartoon characters at least slightly more.

No generation of MLP has ever looked entirely natural, but of course complete naturalism is not (and rarely is) the point of a funny animal cartoon, though G4 definitely goes further with the anthropomorphism than any earlier generation.

The G1 ponies do actually seem to resemble Shetlands somewhat, which is why I use them as my base "real horse" for writing fan fiction. The new ponies don't resemble anything in particular.