Excellent post, Texarkana. It’s too bad that your rebuttal using facts, logic, and common sense doesn’t seem to keep the same argument from reappearing once a week.
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To all the posters who think we are ruining “our” Thoroughbreds with the current breeding practices–stop complaining and put your money where your mouths are so you can show us how to do it better.
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There are absolutely soundness problems that have genetic components, and MOST breeders try to avoid them or to select around them.
There’s a reason you don’t see people linebreeding to Wild Risk, for example…he got his straight, upright shoulder from his sire Rialto and passed that particular structure along. He is most commonly found in the pedigrees of Unbridled and Blushing Groom – and the descendants who have the worst examples of those leg structures are not commonly found in breeding stock. Red Bullet, by Unbridled, is probably the Ur-example. He had a world of talent in spite of a straight shoulder, straight pasterns, and knees most often described with words like “pretzel” and “eggbeater.” He couldn’t stay sound and he didn’t get a lot of mares after his first few seasons.
I used Wild Risk via Unbridled for a reason…there’s a lot of noise about horses descending from Phalaris being a major source of unsoundness, and Raise a Native in particular. Except…there is nobody in Unbridled’s male line (Fappiano, Mr. Prospector, Raise a Native) who has that particular front-end alignment. His dam’s sire’s sire, Wild Risk, is not tail-male to Phalaris, but he’s the source of that front end.
The descendants of Unbridled who are still present in the breeding shed are horses like American Pharoah, Country Star, Halfbridled, Birdstone, etc. If you look at their conformation, it’s all quite variable as they have several other inputs, but none of them have that Wild Risk shoulder/legs.
