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One of the things that I like best about this sport is the correct breeding side – studying pedigrees, sales, bloodlines etc. However, this haphazard commercial approach is ruining the sport in a lot of ways. Like many other pasttimes like football etc, this is no longer a sport in the classic sense, but a business with an audience. Shame.
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Really used the Shami example to kick off the discussion I haven’t given up on him yet
One of the problems I agree is commercial breeders trying to make a fast buck and also the stress on precocity and speed in young horses.
I hate the way Coolmore pack them off after their third year, when they are not yet mature racehorses to make a quick fast buck – now they’ve got Galileo shuttling round the world.
When you see that Halling didn’t make his debut until the July of his third year then all is not lost and I love to see these later-developing types like Pilsudski, Swain come into their own at 5 and 6
Actually a local sucessful trainer MILTON BRADELY has a valid method!!! he disregards breeding traits and runs any horse on its merits he FINDS what the animal does in training so any passed bloodlines are thrown away and HE runs them to the distance that the horse is best at and if one thinks logically about this it seems by the results in lower class races(has proven by his record) distances are irrelevant based on the dam/sire of any animal that he takes on to train.
Regards MERLIN
I realise what you are saying, but I think you are being slightly unfair to Coolmore. They are in it to make money, its their business, and their job. I’m sure I would have done the same thing at the end of last year. If you had Galileo would you have risked losing him altogether for the good of the sport? They stood/stand to make millions (yes, I know they already have millions). That’s just the way life is, money makes the world go round. But think of how many years he could stand there for them, if he turns out to be any good as a sire he could be there for 20 years. Look at Supreme Leader – a leading National hunt sire, he was about 25 when he died last month. You can’t force people to keep their horses racing, you might prefer it, but this way I’m sure they’d argue that they are giving more mares the chance to be covered by him etc. <br>Just be thankful they haven’t introduced AI to the TB world yet – that would be a disaster.
Hobnob,
I’m interested to know whey you think introducing AI into the TB world would be a disaster.
I’ve preached the same point as you for years (quoting top horses/failed sires) but my wife has persuaded me otherwise.
I think that the TB, as a breed is becoming more and more inbred, which seems a shame after hundreds of years trying to get away from and preventing this. I’m not really into statistics, but I’d be interested to know just how many of the TB ‘population’ of the world have some Northern Dancer blood and how few are completely free of it. Breeders (including my own family), feel ‘forced’ to go to fashionable stallions, in an attempt to sell the foal, at any stage in its life. A huge proportion of the stallions seem to have some Northern Dancer/Sadler’s Wells blood. This might be OK now, but in 10 or twenty years time, when you have mares of this bloodline going to stallions of similar lines (both of which may have ND on both dam and sire lines), I don’t think would be any good. <br>At the minute, without AI, stallions can only cover a limited amount of mares a year (obviously it varies from stallion to stallion), but if AI were introduced they could cover far, far more mares. OK, it would be good in some ways – disease prevention and the semen could be transported over long distances instead of the mares or stallions for example, but I feel it would only make the problem outlined above worse.<br>And I’m not really into genetics and used ND as an example, but that’s how I feel. If AI was introduced, then it wouldn’t be long before embryo transplantation was, this might be a blessing in some cases. A lot of rules would have to be laid down before any of this could take place.
This notion that the throughbred is more inbred than in years gone by is simply NOT TRUE!
Any accepted measurement of ‘inbredness’ shows that the thorougbred is less inbred than it was 100 years ago, when it was less inbred than 100 years before that.
I just don’t understand where people get this idea from.
There is a genuine issue about the over-use of shuttle stallions and a possible future reduction in gene-pool variability, but at the present time it just ain’t so!
Hobnob,
I take your point about overuse of stallions – it does not seem so long ago that they only covered the 40+ mares belonging to share holders!
However, even though stallions are far more used at home and on shuttle duty, I think that even the most commercial stallion masters realise there comes a point where it makes their offspring less valuable if the market is saturated.
We are more involved with arabs than TBs and AI works well there. The top Maktoum stallions are all AI and it not only prevents their stallions getting any diseases it keeps the costs down for the mare owners as they do not have to travel and board away for weeks.
I agree it is important to put strict rules in place but think how more convenient it would be if you wanted to be covered by, for example, Giant’s Causeway, but did not want to fly off to America at huge expense and possible risk to mare and foal in utero.
I agree embryo transplant is on the horizon – they are already experimenting with it in Australia – and I think it is hard to stop progress. Much better to put rules and regulations in place now (rather than trying to ignore the possibility – as I think some movers and shakers are trying to do) so that it is controlled.
I also think that it may be a better way of getting outcrosses. Just think of all the extra Mr. Prospector/Blushing Groom/Sunday Silence blood you could tap into in the States and Japan (as well as Grand Lodge/Linamix etc if you are based in England).
It would also save the shuttle stallions from having the exhausting and potentially dangerous trips to Australia etc.
Best wishes,
Adrian<br>
Venusian – I didn’t mean to say that it the breed is more inbred now than years ago, what I mean was that it is in danger of becoming more inbred.<br>Adrian, I am familiar with AI, and its related procedures as I come from a farming background and have used it on both cattle and pigs, and sport horses, and am not completely against the idea! There are numbers of good points like I mentioned – disease prevention, and transporting it over long distances being some of the main ones as well as being able to store semen and use it after the death of the sire. I think it could lead to more inbreeding, as well as helping to ease the situation. Most people can see the big picture – that as the market becomes more saturated with the produce of a certain stallion, the value falls, but a lot of breeders think ‘oh – that horse sold for £*****, I’ll try and breed one of those by that stallion too’. They see it as taking a chance, hoping that they’ll be lucky too, and as future vendors, they are governed by fashions, they want to take a chance at making a profit by going to a successful, fashionable sire, rather than having no chance of making a profit if they use an ‘unfashionable’ sire. Whilst AI would help in some ways, I think it would only lead to more overuse of the so-called ‘fashionable sires’, particularly if it gets to the stage where the semen can be transported to the mares, and your own vet, or even you can give it to the mare. I think some sort of limit, on the amount of mares a stallion can cover pre year(either conventionally or by AI) could be good, but any representative of breeders I’ve asked so far has been adament that that will never happen – they say its unfair to the stallion owners. Some sort of rules (strict ones) have to be laid down, and soon!
Sorry, just read this on another site. The AQHA were taken to court saying that their restrictions (one embryo transfer per mare per year) were against Texas laws of free trade (or something like that). But here’s the interesting bit:<br>The AQHA case may also open the door for changes at The Jockey Club, which bans both artificial insemination and embryo transfer. A Pennsylvania palomino Thoroughbred breeder has said she is proceeding with a lawsuit against The Jockey Club on the grounds that its ban on artificial insemination is a violation of free trade.Bob Curran Jr., vice president of corporate communications for The Jockey Club, said the cases are fundamentally different.The AQHA case was not about whether embryo transfer should be allowed or not, the organization had already endorsed the rule. The case, instead, was about how that rule should be administered."The AQHA rules were different from The Jockey Club’s eligibility rules," Curran said. "As a result, we cannot comment on the purposes of the AQHA rules or whether they raised any legitimate legal concerns."Curran reiterated that The Jockey Club’s rules protect the integrity of the breed to define the product the Thoroughbred industry offers and ensure it will be able to continue to provide that traditional high-quality racing product for generations to come. <br>
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