Stolensilver - I think it depends. IMO, there’s a place for both. Particularly when you start with a registry, v. a breed, which many sporthorse “creators” have done, there has to be a fairly decent junk of “reproducing what others are producing” to keep enough consistency within the registry to be able to accomplish registry goals and create results that can have some halfway reliable duplication. OTOH, a lot of that effort to create consistency ties back to a cross that was, originally, not a duplication of what everyone else was doing.
This goes back to the point that I was trying (maybe sucessfully, maybe not) to make earlier on breeding wb jumpers (which is somewhat synonymous with Holsteiner breeding these days, although SF might beg to differ and KWPN might just rebrand product nod).
A lot of the successful jumpers today originated from the “registry” as opposed to “breed” approach. What those registries did, in large parts, was to take Harness/Trotting blood and introduce TB and AngloArab (the latter usually from a SF source, and sometimes the trotting blood as well, although that’s a bit more the untold/unacknowledged story).
So now, what involved taking some fairly disparate horses 4 or more generations ago has now, because of registry direction and because breeders within a registry were willing, in some large portions, to do what the others in the registry were doing, has become something where there is a product that is now being reproduced from more and more similar sires and dams than the more dissimilar sires and dams of multiple generations ago.
With many (maybe even most? it would be interesting for someone to do the comparisons) of the top jumping horses and top jumper producing sires, you have a situation where around 4 or so generations back, almost every cross in the pedigree has XX or OX (sometimes Trak) and also has some kind of trotting/harness aspect (often from the damline). With lots of linebreeding back (be it Cottage Son, Rantzau, Ladykiller or Orange Peel) and forth, and lots of line breeding already existing in some of the harness dams used originally, you began to generate a more and more reproducible product.
I think this is the safe, sweetspot, for many breeders right now and it is going to produce some nice offspring. The bigger question becomes, to what extent has the linebreeding and type selection resulted, today, with the Holsteiners becoming something more like a breed, where the end product will continue to be reproducible without significant new insertions of EITHER xx or harness/trotter blood or to what extent, as the XX and OX repeated insertions from th 4th or so generation become the 7th or 8th or more generation there will NEED to be additional insertions of XX, OX or trotter blood. I don’t think that one is a known yet. I think the search for some XX that brings particular things to the table is partly a failsafe, in case it does end up being needed, but the breeders are by and large more convinced in continuing what has been successful the last 2 or 3 generations. If they have achieved something in the way of a “breed” type result in such a few generations, due to the carefulness of the crosses, then they may not end up needing tb insertions as much.
Part of that will also depend on the courses of the future as well. As trends in courses change, the horse that handles that often changes some as well.
If the breeders who rely on continuing a reproduction of what has been done for the last couple or so generations of jumper breeding are right - they get to claim the sweet spot for a long time to come. If they are wrong, over time they will be breeding for diminishing returns as the sucessful insertions of blood drift further back. Or, as the successful insertions of trotter/harness drift further back. Either/or. I hope this all ties in some fashion to the original post - with the diversity spect. It sounds as if a part of the Holstein focus is on not keeping the registry so focused on the successful crosses over the last 2 generations that the registry loses the ability to turn to other genetic sourcing, relatively quickly, if there begins to be a drop in that proven cross success.
I’ll always be a tb girl. I think a lot of the problem with use of tbs in this country is that we don’t have the same tb riders that we had, once upon a time. I think a lot of European riders can handle a quirky/hot horse these days better than the Americans, who used to have the touch with them. OTOH, you can’t argue with success or against what the trotting/harness blood addes or the raw power of some of the wbs that are produced today.
Still (and esp if you live in an area like the Lexington area) I agree with Baywithchrome that a lot of really lovely tbs do fall through the “win at 2 or die” cracks and they can be the basis for something special here at home. Whether or not they will be, with our record keeping woes and lack of regional registry support etc. - that’s a big big question mark.
The fact that I love tbs and will always prefer them is a really different discussion from the discussion of all the things the Holsteiner registry has gotten right on the jumper front and the likelihood that it has begun to solidify those successes into something that is operating more like a breed and less like a registry and that may need less and less infusions in the future.
All fwiw - some arguments only time will win.
