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Re: [RC] [RC] Arabian Horse Numbers - heidi

Interesting.  Would be interesting to figure out which blood lines have
that.  However, like CID and HYPP, the big high powered high dollars
folks won't allow such information to be out amongs the 'little people'
of the horse world.

Actually, with the advent of SCID testing, one can request test
information on breeding stock prior to making breeding choices.  Very
simple, very straightforward.

I have quit breeding and many others quit long ago as can't even recoup
the feed bill for the mare.  The IRS changes in the 80s killed the small
breeders.  The fancy  breeders have kept their numbers down so demand
will keep the prices up.  Horse prices have not changed much over the
past 20 yrs.  Cutting horses and barrel horses are where the money is.
The balance sheet has not happened for Arabians.  Also, when Arabians
were first introduced, their owners did not do it in a friendly manner
but as snobbery.  Also, with the breeding pool so small, some qualities
that were not the best were retained.

A bit of a different perspective...  When Arabians first came on the scene
in this country roughly a century ago, there simply were not very many of
them, hence the prices were high for the times.  But snobbery wasn't a
part of it--while they indeed were often owned by the wealthy, they were
often readily available at stud to grade mares and were openly advertised
in publications such as Western Horseman.  They were promoted as quality
family and riding horses--which they were.  During the post WWII era and
on into the 60s, Arabians frequently WERE family horses, and could be
found in many ranching operations, etc.  The American gene pool of
Arabians far surpassed that of any other country at that time, and was a
much larger gene pool than that of, say, the TB (which is now down to two
sire lines in this country, for instance).  It was the laxity of the tax
laws that was actually the downfall of the breed, in a genetic sense,
although the 70s through the mid-80s were a financial boom time. 
Investors who had no clue which end of the horse the feed went into
"collected" Arabians like so much pottery, for exhorbitant prices.  Fad
breeding went into high gear, and if your horse wasn't sired by something
with an asterisk at the front of his name, you were nobody.  THIS was the
era of snobbery--not the era when Arabians were introduced....

A great deal of valuable genetic material WAS lost to this craze, sad to
say.  But a great deal of what was valuable about the breed still remains,
and there WERE breeders at the time who saw the handwriting on the wall
and who rode out those times and remained true to the breed, instead of
caving in to the investment mentality.

Those who continued to breed good riding horses really didn't have their
markets dented at all until the crash of the scam years.  At that point,
there WERE huge "fancy" breeders, as you call them--and the huge numbers
of horses that they were producing, many of which were NOT suitable riding
stock, did indeed flood the market.  Additionally, many small breeders who
depended upon the shirt-tails of the "big names" went by the wayside and
added to the flooding of the market.

But now we have pretty well moved through that phase.  Only a handful of
the "fancy" folks are breeding in high numbers now.  The grassroots folks
who stuck to their guns are finding new outlets not only in endurance but
in the upswing of sport horse events.  But these ARE small breeders,
because they do not have disposable fortunes.  It is now the serious small
breeders who are really making up the backbone of the breed.  We seem to
be entering a new era, where the market flooding is drying up to a
trickle.  What we do with the new era remains to be seen.

Heidi



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Replies
Re: [RC] [RC] Arabian Horse Numbers, Mary Ann Spencer