Juding a Horse by its Pedigree

[LaurieB]

Flame suit zipped up

I love Thoroughbreds. I’ve bred quite a few including several sets of full siblings, and numerous half-siblings. I’ve also revisted the same stallions on many occasions. Many of those horses turn out the way I expect–with regard to looks, temperament, precosity, aptitude and/or ability–but many others do not. It doesn’t mean they’re not good racehorses, it just means that they’re different than I’d planned.

You only have to look at race results and pedigrees to see that the same is often true across the board. TB breeders aim for dirt and get turf horses. Or breed for stamina and get sprinters. Horses whose pedigrees say they “should” be stars at two, take an extra year to mature. Parents with mild temperaments produce hot horses. One full sibling is a G1 winner, the other can’t break its maiden. (Hello California Chrome.)

And yet…the prevailing wisdom here seems to be that all you have to do is look at a TB pedigree and you can reliably predict pretty much anything about a hypothetical horse. Jumping ability, temperament, desire to event? No problem–because a single familiar name 3-4 generations back once produced something suitable. So this horse will follow suit.

I’m sorry but this all seems like voodoo to me. Or gazing into a crystal ball. Despite my experience with TBs, if all I have to go on is a pedigree you might as well ask me if the unseen horse has a blaze and three socks–because I don’t know. And my answer to that is as likely to be right as my predictions about the rest of it.

These days people seem to believe that every scrap of knowledge is easily available on the internet. But doesn’t it make more sense to look at the TB standing in front of you and base your thoughts on what you can actually see and experience about the horse? It does to me anyway.

[gumtree]

Excellent post!

Only the pedigree pundit’s look past the 3rd-4th+++ dams. The majority of us who have been writing the checks know everything else by and large is “window dressing” after the 3rd dam by and large, all things being equal. I have always found it amusing when the pundit’s tout a mating they did and the resulting foal is a good one. They don’t talk about the other 20-50-100+ matings they planned that couldn’t our run a fat man. Few if any have written a stud fee check let alone own a mare and pay for her keep.

The learning curve with a maiden mare can be steep and expensive. IME it takes a couple of foals to get a handle on what type she throws. Until that happens it can be a bit of a crap shoot.

I rarely if ever bred back to the same stallion. Nor would I advise clients to. Esp if I am trying to catch lightening in a bottle because the first one was a “good” horse. If the half sibling was a stakes winning colt. I hoped and prayed the fill sib was going to be a filly.

When I was short listing yearlings on paper. The only reason I would look at a full sibling was to see what it looked liked compared to its older brother. They only reason I would consider buying a full sibling was if it was a filly. Statistics don’t lie when it comes to full brothers.

When choosing yearlings/foals starting with the catalog.page. I wanted just the hip numbers to take with me to the barns. Hand the numbers to the consignor and did my best not to see their stall cards. Inspect the horse, make my mental notes and then open open my catalog to write them down. Having looked at 1000s and 1000s over the years I have a very good handle on what “families” should look like. What comes with the family. “Faults” that are part of the package. Because I have seen their other siblings. The good ones and the slow ones. I have over 30 years of catalog notes in boxes.

Year of taking clients on stallion tours, year in year out looking at all of the best and a lot of “also rans”. Regardless of stud fee.

Always enjoy your posts. I would have really enjoyed working for you!

[PeteyPie]

I suspect that people are not really judging by pedigree as much as it may seem to you. However, pedigrees are easy, interesting and fun to discuss. I think if someone said, “my horse has a beautiful conformation and is a great performer” there is not much left to comment on. After all, we can’t see the horse so we have to take the poster’s word for it and there’s not much left to say except, “How nice for you.” If that person said, “I have a great horse by Areion or Kitten’s Joy or Dubawi”, there would be all kinds of conversation going in all sorts of directions, including the comments "I have worked with three by that sire and they all have (fill in the blank) in common. It’s fun to discuss.

Also, pedigree is a factor for people seriously into breeding horses. You yourself say that you have revisited the same stallions; there must be a reason for that which has to do with qualities you hope to get in the offspring.

There is one thing which can definitely be predicted about pedigree: the result in the sale barn. If you have two yearlings or two-year-olds at Keeneland who have equal conformation and clean vet checks, basically if they are equal, they will not sell for the same amount unless their parents are equal as well. And that doesn’t mean just the performance of their parents but the popularity of the parents. Gumtree touched on this subject in another post when he talked about his frustation when a stud sent a stallion oversees without letting prospective customers know in advance that was the plan. And why was that a problem? Because it affected (negatively) the sales price of the resulting offspring.

I am not a breeder so any discussion I have about pedigree comes from a place of curiousity, interest, or the desire to discuss and compare my horses. It is also an intellectual exercise in learning more about certain horses and how they have contributed to the breed or influenced it.

[vineyridge]

Breeding or picking a horse for discipline is playing the probabilities. If you have results for generations in that discipline you have a better opportunity of evaluating the probabilities. In TB racing, you have those results both near and far. You don’t need to know anything about genetics or epigenetics or anything else because you can look at the results for as many generations as you are interested in. You’d know that if you wanted a dirt horse you’d have a higher probability of getting one with Tapit than Kitten’s Joy.

But if you are searching for a horse in a discipline than it wasn’t bred for, the research isn’t easy. You don’t have generations of results to review. All you can do is look at the horse and then look at the horses in the pedigree and see if any of them have produced or come from lines that have produced results in that discipline. If, for example, you see a stallion who produced over a thousand foals lifetime, and none of them or their descendants had ever done anything noteworthy in the discipline in question, why would you be interested in a horse carrying those genes? Especially since the total number of available TB genes is really quite limited. On the other hand, if you know that certain TB lines have a history of producing good sport jumping horses, then you believe that a horse with those lines in multiples going back generations will have a higher probability of being a good sport jumping horse than if the horse has no lines who have produced anything in that discipline.

If you look at the pedigrees of steeplechasers in Europe, the same names show up over and over again, going back many generations. There is almost a recipe for steeplechase breeding, and it isn’t necessarily limited to 3 or 4 generations. Using pedigrees with those names doesn’t guarantee anything, but it raises the probability of getting a chaser. A breeder might still get a flat sprinter anyway.

No one ever said there were guarantees; all there are are probabilities.

[merrygoround]

Aww! and Deb Bennet PHD Extraordinary, just wrote a whole big article on racing breeding,and inbreeding.

Too bad, it just ain’t that simple.

[vineyridge]

@merrygoround

Aww! and Deb Bennet PHD Extraordinary, just wrote a whole big article on racing breeding,and inbreeding.

Too bad, it just ain’t that simple.

Got a link to the Bennett article? I have saved a series she did several years ago about the founder sires in TB breeding and their effects on conformation.

[NancyM]

I am so “small time” and “regional” compared to most of you. But this subject transcends that, and I have been involved in both the racing and jumping disciplines locally for a long time, with TB horses, bought, sold and bred them. And it is fascinating.

When you get a good one, you can see what you like in it’s pedigree. When you see a pedigree, you see what you already like and don’t like, and what has worked well in the past. When you work with and see a lot of horses locally, get of one sire, you can often see similarities in both conformation and personality, and athletic ability, whether that is for racing or for jumping disciplines. This will either draw you, or repel you when looking at the next pedigree page. But the trick is, to know the horses themselves, not just their recorded performance and earnings. And there are never any guarantees of anything.

Prices based on pedigree pages is a rich man’s game. Some people think that the more you pay, the better the horse is, and the “fancier” the pedigree, the more likely the price will be high. This perception has of course been proven to be false, but it still persists. Breeders depend on it. Bidders with large bank accounts participate in it, fortunately for the breeding industry. Sometimes, it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. Rich people like a good bidding war, it is part of the fun to be “victorious” on sale day, everyone claps, and the buyer gets congratulated. “Poor” people, or “people on a budget” can’t participate like this. Economics must rule. If a person with limited resources buys a fancy pedigree, and it earns half a million, that success is cancelled out if the purchase price was $1,000,000. Paying $3000 for the horse and earning half a million is what the economy minded buyer is looking for. The pedigree page is what tells you what horses you can NOT be interested in. Because if it is “fancy” and you CAN afford it, there is a reason why, and you don’t want to go there.

The limited budget buyer must look at the pedigree page, and see enough there that he likes to see the potential for lightening to strike. He must look for the spot that lightening has not yet struck, or not struck recently, but might strike in the future. Anyone with money can buy the pedigree where lightening has already struck, the black type close up on the page clearly shows you that. But that doesn’t mean that lightening is going to strike there again. And that goes for both racing success and jumping success. True horsemen always look at the individual, as well as the pedigree page. Some influences may be seen in the individual due to pedigree, some may come out in time, good or bad. And sometimes the individual is some wild throwback to something lost in the decades or centuries past, and apparently unrelated to the pedigree you see on the page.

Great subject! Thanks for the chance to opine.

[Palm_Beach]

@LaurieB

Flame suit zipped up

I love Thoroughbreds. I’ve bred quite a few including several sets of full siblings, and numerous half-siblings. I’ve also revisted the same stallions on many occasions. Many of those horses turn out the way I expect–with regard to looks, temperament, precosity, aptitude and/or ability–but many others do not. It doesn’t mean they’re not good racehorses, it just means that they’re different than I’d planned.

You only have to look at race results and pedigrees to see that the same is often true across the board. TB breeders aim for dirt and get turf horses. Or breed for stamina and get sprinters. Horses whose pedigrees say they “should” be stars at two, take an extra year to mature. Parents with mild temperaments produce hot horses. One full sibling is a G1 winner, the other can’t break its maiden. (Hello California Chrome.)

And yet…the prevailing wisdom here seems to be that all you have to do is look at a TB pedigree and you can reliably predict pretty much anything about a hypothetical horse. Jumping ability, temperament, desire to event? No problem–because a single familiar name 3-4 generations back once produced something suitable. So this horse will follow suit.

I’m sorry but this all seems like voodoo to me. Or gazing into a crystal ball. Despite my experience with TBs, if all I have to go on is a pedigree you might as well ask me if the unseen horse has a blaze and three socks–because I don’t know. And my answer to that is as likely to be right as my predictions about the rest of it.

These days people seem to believe that every scrap of knowledge is easily available on the internet. But doesn’t it make more sense to look at the TB standing in front of you and base your thoughts on what you can actually see and experience about the horse? It does to me anyway.

Is there a question in there somewhere or is it just a stream of consciousness? I don’t breed or mess much with youngsters because you don’t know exactly which genes end up on a specific chromosome that ends up in an ovum or sperm cell that grows into a horse. It is the biggest gamble in racing, and I just don’t have the stomach for it. You truly don’t even know that the horse will have 4 legs and 2 eyes, much less if it will be a good race horse.

[ASB_Stars]

@Palm Beach

Is there a question in there somewhere or is it just a stream of consciousness? I don’t breed or mess much with youngsters because you don’t know exactly which genes end up on a specific chromosome that ends up in an ovum or sperm cell that grows into a horse. It is the biggest gamble in racing, and I just don’t have the stomach for it. You truly don’t even know that the horse will have 4 legs and 2 eyes, much less if it will be a good race horse.

Wow. Just wow.

[beowulf]

You should always judge the horse in front of you. That being said, the TB is a very small, closed gene pool. You see enough of them by the same stallion (or mare) and you start to come to expect similarities. Is it a crystal ball? No.

If that wasn’t the case, people couldn’t pick out a Freud baby in a line-up… but… you can… or… you wouldn’t consistently see the same shoulder from AP Indy… but… you do…

Then you have the sires that consistently pass on good movement (for sport). Unbridled’s Song, Giant’s Causeway, Hennesy, Corinthian, Dance With Ravens. I mean very reliably, and consistently. So you start to look for horses by these stallions, and you see similarities.

The pedigree is only a small part of the horse - and the horse doesn’t read its’ papers. But if pedigree wasn’t important, people wouldn’t be linebreeding to specific ancestors, or carefully researching nicks for their mare. And, to take it out of the TB world and into the WB world, where pedigree is very important when looking for an UL horse, people wouldn’t be shopping with specific stallions in mind (aka “No Jazz!” or “Rubenstein only” or “Krack C only!” – or Quidam De Revel or Balou du Rouet for jumping… etc etc.)

Aka you don’t put a cart horse in front of a fence and expect it to be the next Sapphire.

[skydy]

@Palm Beach

Is there a question in there somewhere or is it just a stream of consciousness? I don’t breed or mess much with youngsters because you don’t know exactly which genes end up on a specific chromosome that ends up in an ovum or sperm cell that grows into a horse. It is the biggest gamble in racing, and I just don’t have the stomach for it. You truly don’t even know that the horse will have 4 legs and 2 eyes, much less if it will be a good race horse.

It seems that you are the only one here who didn’t understand the OP…

Breeding horses is not for everyone and, obviously, not for you.

Dedication, and a significant investment of time and money are required to be a responsible breeder of horses. Some people, whether they breed, have experience working for breeders or are just interested, enjoy discussing the process.

Not you. We get that.

[snaffle1987]

ahhh the beauty of genetics. turf vs dirt, I personally think, is not a genetic thing. At least in the US with our breeding programs; I think it boils down to preference of the horse. I firmly believe that there is not some inherited gene that makes a horse run better on turf vs dirt and the idea of it is in incredibly old school. Now if we look to European breeding programs which have been selectively breeding specifically for turf excellence for hundreds of years, I think its a different story.; their horses are also bred to run farther distances and often have more stamina than NA bred horses.

The think about racing is the entire idea of it is a gamble. There are so many minute factors that affect a horse’s ability to win. Genetics, weather, training, jockey, other horses in the race, starting position, race interference, footing, health, soundness, the list goes on and on. While you have noted California Chrome, the same can be said for the likes of Tapit, as well as just about any other G1 winner. It only takes 5 minutes of time to look up their half or full siblings and see how much of failures they were in comparison to their genetic counterparts. That is why purchasing foals from these winners or siblings of these winners is an absolute gamble and the chances of it paying off is minimal unless you’re more interested in having something to retire to the breeding shed for your own personal collection. This can be seen in the talent that Mandy Pope’s collection has produced thus far.

As far as athletic ability goes with horses off the track; looking at pedigree can help. Its not a guarantee but it’s a good starting point. Of course, a video to go along with it helps as well. Medaglia D’Oro, for instance, sires beautiful movers, beautiful conformed horses with natural inherited athletic ability. Problem for hunter/jumpers or eventers is you cant get one unless its a Gelding. Bonn Nuit Lines and anything from that line has extreme jumping ability. Even those farther removed from original stallion have a gifted ability for sport. Bernardini’s have become popular with eventers. Pleasant Colony was well received for his offspring’s athletic ability. As have many, many others. A pedigree is not a guarantee but like racing genetics (Tapit, Medaglia D’oro, Tiznow, etc) there are certain lines within the TB breed who have great athletic ability and talent when compared to others but that talent also depends on soundness, brains, training, health and care, etc up to a certain point in life. No different than looking at the sires used in Europe to produce their jump horses for steeplechase. American bred thoroughbreds would be hard challenged to jump those fences and last those distances even though they have thoroughbred papers; they were not bred to be jump horses.

[Palm_Beach]

@skydy

It seems that you are the only one here who didn’t understand the OP…

Breeding horses is not for everyone and, obviously, not for you.

Dedication, and a significant investment of time and money are required to be a responsible breeder of horses. Some people, whether they breed, have experience working for breeders or are just interested, enjoy discussing the process.

Not you. We get that.

Sure I do. Breeding is very risky, and the risk decreases as the horse standing in front of you ages. Are you going to sell the youngster? At what age, what sale? Will you ever get your money back if it doesn’t bring what you want at auction, and you keep it and race it? Why won’t buyers spend what you feel the horse is worth?

Both American Pharoah and Justify were mid 6 figure yearlings. Who would have picked them out as triple crown winners? Apparently not many.

[skydy]

Except for a few idiots that breed horses and know nothing about what they are doing (whom we are not discussing) many of those questions have been asked and answered before the mare is bred. As for the uncertain aspects of breeding and sales, they are inherent. Breeders accept the risks, while doing their best to minimize them.

It is definitely not a profitable venture for most small, private, operations. Those who expect it to be profitable are usually disappointed and don’t continue breeding, (but we aren’t discussing people who blindly jump into a venture without research).

You seem to be wondering why anyone would enjoy breeding horses. On a breeding forum. It’s not for you, but some people do find it rewarding, despite the uncertainty.