German vet discusses flawed breeding and issues with movement

So I am not alone. I tracked down the breeder of a horse I had for only a few months to let them know, after a rough few years, he had landed softly, but unfortunately had Wobbler’s so I had him PTS.

Imo, a nice follow up and a heads up about Wobbler’s in regards to their breeding program.

The entire response back from the breeder, “There is nothing we can do.”

I wasn’t farking asking for anything. I was giving them information and hopefully some peace of mind about one of their “kids” that had fallen way off their radar.

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So much for 5th or further back generation of having the same stud or mare. United Touch S 's stud and mare share the same dam, Cantate Touch. Inbreeding. Grandmother is the same.

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Factor in many of these diseases don’t show up until the horse is teens or aged too. By that point the stallion could have hundreds of offspring on the ground. Look at Secret - he was/is so incredibly popular with breeders and is still so young himself.

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Are you even familiar with this horse?

I would never have the huevos to do it, but in this case it absolutely worked. Watch the videos of this horse. He is an incredible animal.

@BWP I believe on that website if you are a member, the inbreeding coefficient is one of the percentages listed towards the bottom of the page.

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The individuals involved with having to euthanize their young horses are not substandard, unethical coaches/trainers. They spent insurance/personal money to find out the cause of mystery lameness and neurological problems. I’m very aware of the type of coach/trainer you are mentioning, we have a few like that here.

How many young horses have to be destroyed, to get the incredible animal? No, I personally don’t know the horse. Warmblood 1 said line breeding was defined as 5th generation or further out and anything closer was inbreeding.

As I said, I will take the advice of my well respected vets whose words mirror the German vet and will not buy anything that is inbred/ line bred. If you(g) are comfortable with line breeding no one is stopping you from doing it or buying it.

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This is the problem for any type of reproduction, including humans. We can not necessarily screen or predict all genetic diseases. That is life, it is unfortunate, but we can employ modern medicine the best we can to prevent issues.

I also don’t think I’d ever compare major European WB registries to AQHA. At least the major WB registries require stallion testing or admit stallions based on advanced performance records and most do require inspections for breeding mares. WB registries also will frequently do linear panels to show what stallions pass on consistently including incidents of OCD, conformational aspects, etc. AQHA is extremely loose with their requirements and accept pretty much anything as breeding stock with a certificate of pedigree. The genetic issues amongst the breeds are also quite different. Fortunately, issues within WBs such as ECCMV, OCD, WFFS, (etc) are becoming more commonly understood and attempts to avoid them are more frequently being made. Obviously, there are poor breeders in every realm but I don’t believe it’s fair to paint all breeders as negligent or bad become some are.

@BWP, I was going by the inbreeding coefficient on horsetelex- I did not calculate it so it could be wrong. Regardless, the coefficient is high and that particular stallion is an example of how inbreeding can be successful at replicating desirable and predictable characteristics.

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I believe what will be more useful for breeders going forward — versus eliminating linebreeding — is genetic testing. There are still several diseases whose heritability is not well understood, but there are several companies out there attempting to isolate gene markers and create testing tools for breeders. KS and EPSA/DSLD are in the works from what I remember.

Regarding the comment up thread a bit about malformed cervical vertebrae— there is some debate about this in breeding and vet circles. On the one hand, studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that there is no correlation between the malformation and performance loss. However, there are people who have horses with this malformation that are neurological and need to be PTS. Much like KS, at this time it appears that pathology on radiographs do not guarantee symptoms.

AFAIK most domestic breeds also have this malformation. It’s present in TBs, WBs, and STBs and is not a recent development.

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Yes, I said as much. Just wondering if someone who IS a member can confirm the IC was indeed 41.4?

Here’s the dilemma. Think about human families. In most modern developed urban countries there is no linebreeding, let alone inbreeding. People marry into completely separate families, in some cases into completely different cultural or racial groups. And the children are very diverse physically. One child looks like mom, one child looks like dad, one child looks like a paternal aunt or maternal uncle or a grandparent. Talents and height and athletic ability are very different. Even when both parents are from the same general cultural group. And children can pop up music or artistic talent the parents never had.

This is wonderful and charming in human families. For an animal breeding program it would be a disaster. Breed a Percheron to a TB and you can get anything from a recognizable draft horse with feathers to a heavy hunter to something that looks like a Lusitano standing still at least :slight_smile: to some surprisingly fine boned smaller kids jumpers. We have a local eventing/ lesson operation that was doing this and I have seen a lot of this cross, likely from the same stallion. Some were clearly not what you really want in an eventer.

That’s the extreme (horse equivalent of the leggy model marrying a big handsome football player where they hope the girls take after mom and the boys take after dad, which is not at all guaranteed).

But performance animals need to be more predictable in outcome. Dogs of any given breed are almost identical (unless its your beloved dog) as are Freisian horses (small genetic pool). But then so are most wild animals, even when they come from different regions, so only thinking about domestic animals. Which were bred long ago to have a huge range of diversity, and that diversity captured by inbreeding or linebreeding. If that hadn’t happened we’d all be riding Prezwolskis horses or tarpans or zebras.

So the specialized domestic animal is already linebred over centuries to lock in desired traits. Along with that comes some congenital risk as well as benefits. But breeders of both dogs and horses have ignored these to some extent, especially when the issues pop up in middle age. Lordosis in Saddlebreds. HYPP in QH. PSSM. Poor feet in TB. And the wierd things now becoming evident in WB like DSLD and shivers and string halt.

It’s true that we don’t have genetic tests or even in some cases real diagnostic tests. But they are something you might observe if you kept your own horses, and didn’t send AI semen over the world and have no idea where the babies went. Also the more a stud breeds, the higher chance somethung gets passed on.

And also some of these issues exist in multiple horse families even multiple breeds. We know where HYPP started and how to test. But PSSM has always existed as Monday Morning Sickness in the old vet books and is now known to exist in a number of distinct breeds so you could get it in a crossbreed.

I do think genetic disease is a thing breeders should be taking seriously and testing for. But when the disease is a by product of breeding for other exaggerated traits, it’s going to be a conflict of interest.

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Like @beowulf and @Libby2563, my concern is more about hyperflexion than line breeding.

I don’t see that much line breeding in WBs, if defined by the fifth gen and under. But I do see a lot of horses I would consider not line breeding that I would not breed to or want in my foal’s pedigree (Bugatti and Furstenball, for instance). There are some lovely horses out there from those stallions, but too many with either soft tissue injuries or DSLD/ESPA.

I had to euthanize a lovely TB for DSLD a number of years ago, and he was not linebred. Damascus/Ogygian pedigree—names super common in race and sport horses with no issues. His showed up around age 9.

I follow a very good FB group on ECVM, very informative.

I also follow a Dressage Breeder Group on FB and see a lot of horses being bred to lines that are flashy, but a hard no for me based on pasterns. Breeding is always roulette, but I prefer not to toss THAT in the mix. My mare is jumper bred anyway, so the chance of line breeding is quite remote when breeding for a dressage horse (but jump brings hind end strength and canter, which are priorities for me!)

The hard part is that when it works out, it can produce a lovely horse…but what about all the ones that don’t make it!

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There is/was an issue with Connemaras, hoof wall separation disease, HWSD.

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Is it still Tapit? Or has someone else taken that mantle up? I haven’t followed racing in a few years…

It’s tough when humans are involved, we come with baggage when it comes to animal husbandry. We keep the broodmare who might not be cutting it in the performance arena and tell ourselves she’s a one off, it’s not a genetic issue, retire the stallion early, and so on, creating an issue that can get buried in the genetics for centuries. Sometimes it’s truly a one off, sometimes we genuinely don’t know, sometimes we might know but we aren’t going there for plausible deniability.

But as you said, inbred and linebred exist over and over in nature while only strengthening the species, but nature doesn’t understand plausible deniability. Doesn’t work? Doesn’t survive. It’s funny, I have a fjord. Fjords have a similar trajectory as Friesians post WWII, a very identifiable breed wrapped up in national identity, almost wiped out with an incredibly small gene pool to rebuild the breed, and a closed book to work with. Same idea, two vastly different outcomes. Friesians are the poster child for genetic issues while fjords are incredibly hardy, tough animals. One looks like human tinkering at work, the other looks like nature at work, which makes sense since humans only had so much impact on fjords. A whole lot of what survived post WWII Norway had to be able to survive in tough conditions with limited calories.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the attraction of our tinkered breeds, I love watching a team of DHH, the modern dressage horse is breathtaking and I’m in awe of the modern show jumper. But as I very happily ride and drive my fjord, I do find myself questioning if we may have started down the road called Too Far, that the downside to the extremes we are selecting for may be creeping up on us and will be entrenched genetically before we know what they are, or how to tease them out of existence.

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I think fu peg briefly held some sort of record, but it was quickly overtaken. If I was guessing who held a record if it could be defined would maybe be storm cat since he sat at the top of the heap for a very long time at a time when stallions were starting to cover more mares per season/stand for longer. But how exactly do you define the “most expensive horse”? What does that mean? Earnings? Progeny earnings? syndication? Maximum insurable value? Someone’s best guess what an already syndicated horse is worth after he’s made it big? Total lifetime earnings in stud/purse? Adjusted dollars?

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That’s not too far off the mark.

One question that helps anyone figure out just “how close is too close” in terms of relatives in a pedigree is to discover the background homogeneity of the population. In other words, if most horses in a breed are already too-closely related to one another, then what would have counted as “line breeding” in a population with more genetic variation would count as “inbreeding.” There is a whole science to this.

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When I was searching for the right stallion to breed my mare to, I noticed some GRP stallions that just looked like they might have DSLD. I even asked that question on a Facebook group for that breed and my post was blocked by the moderator. I did not name any names, just asked if the breed is prone to develop DSLD?

DSLD is in every breed. I try to closely analyze the walk, as sometimes you can see the hyperextension during the walk. If they have the stallion so wrapped up, you can’t see their legs, then I would want more video.

If you want to eliminate DSLD, you would need to avoid breeding to younger stallions, as it may not have shown up yet. Even better if you can get recent video of the horse to see what it currently looks like.

Pssm 2 is another disease that is difficult to identify. My pssm 2 horse didn’t get diagnosed until her teens because the vets assumed she was having lameness issues and she never actually tied up until her teenage years. It took years to identify the actual issue.

These are diseases that don’t show up until later in life. A friend has a beautiful failed show horse with a bucking issue. He bred the mare hoping for a wonderful foal. Guess what? One look at the mare and I noticed
she has DSLD. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying anything.

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I think what is measured on horsetelex is the same as on sporthorse-data, which is “% TB & Arabian”. Note that all TB’s and Arabians are 100%, even those at the furthest generation. Warmblood is percent hot blood and percent cold blood.

Thank you. I really must not be posting clearly on this thread because that’s the point I’m trying to make, hence posting links to 2 full TB sportshorse sires earlier in the thread. Horsetelex has the %xx/ox listed as 41.4. An earlier poster was saying his inbreeding coefficient was (also?) 41.4, however as a pro member I do not have access to the inbreeding coefficient data, only the visible colour coding showing duplicates on the pedigree.

Just seemed a bit of a coincidence that both figures would be the same, hence questioning if anyone who IS a pro member could check.

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The human tendency to believe that if some is good, more is better has led to heritable flaws in just about every breed and species.

Is it any coincidence that often the horses with the most long-term soundness and longevity are ones that are pretty average in a lot of ways? They’re usually correct movers but not particularly extravagant, neither super dainty nor particularly heavy-boned, and their overall conformation is usually lacking in extremes. They may not be the brightest stars and the “natural talent” of their sport, but they’re the ones still consistently doing their job well many years later.

Extravagant movers’ legs are subjected to much greater stress through things like simply trotting around, compared to the legs of horses that are simply “nice enough” movers. It doesn’t surprise me at all that many of them don’t stay sound for long.

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I am not an expert on these vertebral malformations, but I have seen the boiled-down, articulated versions of some of them. The range of just how malformed they are and how many bones are affected is huge.

I would imagine that there’s a big functional difference between a horse that has one greatly-reduced processes (the sticky-outy parts of a vertebra that forms an attachment point for the small muscles that help stabilize the spine, and one that has defects in a few adjacent vertebrae plus stunted ribs in the front of the rib cage, just below the scapulae.

It’s hard to know how much variation in bone shapes is “within normal limits” since most of us haven’t gone looking at lots and lots of horse skeletons. But it was helpful to me to envision just what would have attached to those bones and/or what mechanical job a normal-sized versus an abnormally small rib would have done in the living, moving, ridden animal.

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