Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

> Heidi, all your points are well taken.  The reason I threw this out was
> still on the subject of a "no name" horse, or one where you either
> cannot trace any living relatives, no performance records (might have
> been a rescue horse where papers were lost, etc) or where none of the
> offspring were registered so that you can't trace the relatives.
First of all, I presume we ARE talking about registered horses here--so
you HAVE a pedigree, and there ARE horses in that pedigree.  I'm not
talking about getting to know the ancestors through performance records or
going to look at them, necessarily.  I'm talking about hunting down
photographic evidence, talking to people who knew the horses, digging to
find out that they were used as personal riding horses, etc.  You CAN get
to "know" many of the horses in a pedigree if you hunt hard enough and
long enough.  Study A LOT of pedigrees of performing horses--see what they
have in common, and consider those ancestors--or more importantly, IMO,
the programs from which those ancestors came.  What did those programs use
as selection factors?

> What
> you have is the horse in front of you, and your belief that the
> individual will produce quality offspring (not doing the "aaaaawwww,
> wouldn't it be nice to have a baby" thing!), but a genuine belief in
> what you see in front of you.
I don't breed by just what I see in front of me.  There are too many
variables.  A functional horse with a pedigree all over the map will still
breed all over the map.  I'm happy to RIDE a functional horse with a
pedigree all over the map--he has already won the roll of the dice and
come up with a functional combination.  But as a BREEDING horse he can
still pass on the things you don't see in front of you.  I don't care HOW
many rides a horse wins, or how well-conformed he is--if it seems clear to
me that he got his functionality out of just a handful of his ancestors,
and the rest of his pedigree is the "crap shoot" you were talking about, I
won't use him as a breeding animal, period!

That said, one can't have a successful breeding program without honestly
evaluating the horse in front of you, either.  The way that a quality
bloodline STAYS quality is by what astute breeders select to represent it
on to future generations.  However, an astute breeder can also pretty much
tell you what a horse will throw even if he himself is blemished to the
point of being non-functional.  I have a set of babies here sired by a
horse that I dug up based on pedigree alone--he himself had pulled a hind
hoof off as a yearling, and had been maintained as a pasture pet, despite
being a cripple.  He looked like hell warmed over.  His hindquarters never
developed properly, his back was a mess, etc.  But because I KNEW his
pedigree, and knew that those problems were not issues with his ancestors,
I took an educated leap and ended up with some of the nicest horses in my
herd.  People thought I was nuts breeding good mares to this old
wreck--but they changed their tunes when the babies arrived.

If you are going to predict the worth of a breeding horse, you HAVE to
know what is back there, even if it never got out to perform.  I think one
of the biggest mistakes people make is to breed a horse just because he
"looks good."

I'll give you an example of this that stuck with me from my childhood. 
There was a TB named Pillory that ran back in 1922.  His pedigree did not
predict that he'd be worth a hill of beans on the track.  But he came in
2nd in the Kentucky Derby, and went on to win both the Preakness and the
Belmont.  Gee, by the "performance" model, you'd think he'd be a great
sire, since he could run so well.  Wrong!  He sired just like he was
bred--mediocrity on the track.  He did, however, sire some good riding
horses--which is why I came to know about him.  One of his sons, a
complete dud on the track, came west as a Remount stallion, and sired some
pretty good ranch horses in our area, including the best mare we owned in
our ranching operation.  So he certainly had his qualities as a sire--but
they had little to do with what TBs were being bred to do.  He was a
"crop-out" from a bunch of ancestors that didn't tend to throw horses that
could run, and when he bred on, he bred like his pedigree, not like what
he himself accomplished.

You will see the same thing with regard to conformation or any other set
of traits--it isn't what the horse has that is standing in front of
you--it is what the preponderance of the pedigree has that will tend to
breed on.

> It would be nice to be able to do all the breeding on paper and trace
> all records, but sometimes that just ain't practical ;-))
Again, it isn't the records that interest me--it is the horses themselves.
What were they actually like?  How were they built?  Etc.

Heidi


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Arabians were bred for years primarily as a war horse and those
requirements are similar to what we do today with endurance riding. 
~  Homer Saferwiffle

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