[QUOTE=Manni01;8429785]
well IMO its quite a breeding challenge… Each Generation will become easier, but you have no idea what you will get with a horse with unknown breeding… Even if its a nice horse. Many times the F1 Generation is really nice[/QUOTE]
That’s the essence of the challenge that a grade mare creates for someone running a registry.
So her phenotype-- physical appearance-- may rock. However, you don’t know much about the genetics that produced that. So, does her phenotype “advertise” a genotype (genetics behind it) that will show up in her offspring? It’s hard to say, because you can’t see what her parents and sets of grandparents looked like.
The “F1” term means “First Filial” generation. It comes from Mendelian genetics back around 1900.
If you crossed this mare with a stallion whose pedigree was known, you could infer things about the mare’s genetic contribution… because you know more about what the stallion brought to the table. But it would be relatively little.
If you kept breeding subsequent generations of this mare’s offspring (her children, grand children and great grand children) to the same line of stallions, you’d learn more about what her line tended to contribute genetically.
All this is to say that people need to appreciate the difference between:
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A wonderful individual horse and the concept of phenotype.
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The notion of genotype and the horse whose genetics are known such that one has a decent chance of predicting what that horse will produce when bred… or if bought very young/“on paper”, what the phenotype of the horse will turn out to be. And “phenotype” can include mental characteristics.
The frustrating thing about so many American buyers is that they want some kind of minimal piece of paper for their grade horse. So they take it to a registry and get something that relates only to phenotype and makes none of the implied promises about known genotype that traditional registration implies.
To me, then, that being accepted into some book that leaves a mare 4 generations from having any of her offspring registered is almost worthless. I’d never embark on the project of breeding 4 generations for “her” so as to get one baby registered and assume that it brought the genes of this mare into the registry. Or if I did, I’d have to be young, very knowledgeable about stallions on whom I’d cross these descendents and made of money. And she’d have to be a spectacular mare.
But her acceptance did mean that the jury liked her phenotype well enough to allow some deep-pocketed devotee to embark on their 4-generation breeding empire with this mare. And that’s all it means: The WB people liked the individual horse well enough.
And then American pooh-pooh the value of registration, keurings, papers and the rest. They think it’s rugged and populist and to say, “Hey, you don’t ride the papers.”
True… but THEN they complain about having to go to Europe to find an adequate supply of young horses.
THEY SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED!.. Because that concerted lack of attention to the massive project of learning genotypes and stabilizing it so that you can reliably predict the effects of crosses (which is what registries and limited books do) is what enables breeders to efficiently produce what people want. To put it another way, it makes any cross less of a crapshoot if you now the genetics behind the appearances of sire and dam.
What they are left with, if they don’t care about pedigree, is the obligation to work only from phenotype with each cross. And there will be a lot of misses.
Take what you like and leave the rest. I don’t mind having my ideas culled, lol.
