When did the word thoroughbred become a proper noun,
i.e. Thoroughbred?  What is the rationale and history behind the
change?  Did someone or some industry push for it?   I see it used
one way (uncapitalized) in some newspapers, but capitalized in others
(especially the Herald-Leader).  What’s the scoop?

From Brian Throckmorton, Herald-Leader copy desk chief: Horse people have occasionally complained that we don’t capitalize thoroughbred. Our style has been to lowercase it, possibly because the entry in our dictionary is lowercase, and the stylebook’s rule on animal breeds is to follow the dictionary. For instance, appaloosa is lowercase, but Standardbred is capitalized. Looking into the definitions for thoroughbred, however, one sees that the dictionary capitalizes this one: “any of a breed of light horse developed by crossing Arabian and Turkish stallions with English mares; it is bred primarily for racing.” So, on that basis and out of respect to the large chunk of our readers who are involved with horses, we’ll begin capitalizing Thoroughbred, starting now. … As always, we will avoid applying the term Thoroughbred to animals other than horses. If some exotic case does call for bending that rule, we would lower-case it, per the dictionary: “Sydney said all her dogs are thoroughbred mutts.”

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