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RE: [RC] Barbaro - heidiThey are certainly selected for your #1 premise below, but not for
your #2 premise. By the TB industry's own stats, only 3% ever
even get to the starting gate. The attrition means big
business.
And indeed, those that break down DO often become the parents of the
next generation of race horses--that has been a major contributing
factor, IMO, toward the general trend.
Your paragraph about how amazing it is that any survive the training
is sort of contradictory to your paragraph right ahead of it that
states that those who don't get the time and LSD to build bone don't
become the parents....etc.
One of the places where I think that TI was right on was with his
ideas about building bone in young race horses wtih proper
conditioning--and he was swimming upstream against the entire TB
industry. And while some may be using his methods, I'd wager that
the vast majority are not. TB training is going on much as it used
to, and horses break down, oh well.... You were on the mark with
your previous prognosis that the rules don't change.
You ARE right that TBs and QHs don't mature any faster than other
breeds--at least their skeletons don't. Deb Bennett has good
numbers on that. Their muscles do, though, and therein lies a
part of the problem. They LOOK mature--kind of like the
15-year-old girl in the D-cup bra--but their skeletons are still not
fully developed, just as the 15-year-old's sense of responsibility has
not yet developed to where she is quite ready to be a consenting
adult. We call the 15-year-old girl jail bait, but we call the
3-year-old TB business as usual.
Heidi
I vote against genetic predisposition to breakdown. Here is my reasoning:
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