I don’t think we can always protect people from themselves.
I posted on a recent FB post that the poster was a scammer. Someone asked me why I said that. I listed the reasons. A week later they were out $500.
Also, I’ve not only seen a upper level dressage trainer frequently post pics of a running martingale and a double on FB I’ve also seen draw reins used w the double. I’m not surprised anymore what people use to get the results they want.
Interesting. Well at least it was an educated buyer who actually should have known about mare lines when buying. Hopefully it works out for her and the filly recovers well.
I was specifically referring to a training fork, on a saddle horse.
Just a reminder. This is the 8 month old filly at the barn of the lady who picked her up for the buyer.
That’s done more than you think especially on horses that have a tendency to be unsteady in the full bridle you will usually see trainers use it on horses that toss their head up when you touch the curb or need a bit more steadiness when warming up. A lot of driving horses crossing over to riding use it on full bridles to give a similar feel.
That’s pretty common in the saddleseat world in my somewhat limited experience. Usually the snaffle rein goes through the ring on the fork.
Yes. Happens all the time in the saddlseat world. Different training methods and goals and not my cup of tea but not anything someone would look sideways at.
Yikes. I’ve literally never seen either of those things in my life. And I’ve been around the dressage block so many times I could qualify for the Indy 500 
they probably aren’t as bad as they look. I had a TWH mare that looked like a fire breathing dragon when you led her around. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that she was high as a kite. They breed them this way and they show them this way, they want the “fire”. But often they are actually pretty level headed, they just look showy. My mare had been Zsa Zsa Gabor’s show horse and if you can safely carry an 80 year old around the arena, you’re probably pretty ammy friendly. She scared some people just because of the way she looked, head up, ears pricked, nostrils flared and lots of action, but she was a great husband horse and really steady out on trail.
In some of the saddlebred barns (I boarded in a few), they will use fire extinguishers and other things to make the horses look flashy. They end up being pretty unflappable. Try that with a warmblood or a TB and you won’t get action, you’ll get teleported!
Unfortunately this is true.
I recall an occasion some years back when we rented stalls for the Florida season from a barn owner I knew.
And there was a shady character I knew slightly from previous experience buddying up to the barn owner. I tried to give her a friendly heads up about that person. But she was convinced she knew more about it than I did.
Fast forward 6-12 months, and things had gone exactly as I expected. Tears, lawyers, yada, yada. But not because the barn owner had not been warned. She just thought she knew better.
This woman is not aiming to sell these neglected animals to a “person who was at the top of the sport with big bucks” that you “would really expect” to be able to “discern any BS”. That would not be the person who would be taken in, to buy an animal with this bizarre breeding and horrific lack of care.
This woman is attempting to sell these carelessly bred and neglectfully raised horses (from in utero and after foaling) to amateurs who don’t know any better. Apparently some “trainers”, who don’t have seem to have an eye for functional sporthorse conformation, or the knowledge to know what standards a good breeder upholds (or the skills to research bloodlines) are letting their clients down in a big time way if they collaborate with this breeder to buy a horse from them. I don’t know if that is just ignorance or if it’s greed.
Anyway, I can’t help but have an issue with an opinion that pooh poohs the neglect of these animals by saying “oh I’ve seen worse”, and these starving animals in Kate’s breeding program “doesn’t trigger me”.
“Everything is buyer beware” as you say,
but I think you are missing the point. 
Kind of looks like my mare when I’m more than 15 minutes late turning her out. 
Good.ness. This thread is a doozy. I’m a little late to the party but wanted to chime in with some experience here.
I’ve done two ICSI sessions on a mare of mine and here’s how it has (roughly) broken out. Doing all my own work leading up to and managing the mare, oocyte aspiration has been $1k. Both times around 14 oocytes aspirated, 9 matured enough to fertilize, 3 resultant embryos. One year, a fresh was put in a mare and 2 frozen, this year all 3 were frozen. Each time, the cost was right around $4k for each of those ICSI procedures. Then there’s cost to thaw and transfer. So right around $5-6k, doing most of the other work myself save for aspiration, fertilization, freeze/thaw, and implant. If you need someone else to manage the mares, especially if boarding, it can easily exceed $10-15k. I know someone personally who paid right around that to have her donor and recips managed.
The rest below is just general information, not necessarily responding to you, SusanO…
Said friend’s donor mare came from EMS in terrible shape; feet, condition, mentally in a bad place. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I’ll stick with the clinics I know in Texas……
You can find a la carte pricing on the clinics websites. For those who would like a small rabbit hole, EquiEmbryo and ViaGen post their prices, I think In Foal Inc does as well.
Traditional ET is actually a pretty easy concept in terms of procedure if you have some repro back ground, but technique and skill still dictates success rates. I’ve attempted one myself; no embryo found to transfer. The cycle I bred the mare in wasn’t great and I didn’t have high hopes. So unsuccessful because of lack of experience? Or because the cycle wasn’t great? Who knows. But until I can get some experience under my belt with less-high dollar ETs on an older mare who may have limited time left with us, I’ll keep paying for someone who has a better record than 0-1. But it IS possible for a layman to do traditional ET if they have some extensive experience behind them. ICSI? Not so much.
Full disclosure, I breed QHs so no idea how warmblood registries work. But the way frozen semen is regulated in QH, you need the stallion owner to submit a breeding report and release the breeders certificate for each breeding. So if you have additional frozen that you use and don’t report to the stallion owner (and subsequently pay for the additional breeding), that breeding doesn’t go on the breeding report and therefore foal is unregisterable. Same goes with ICSI embryos, dependent on contract. I have two frozen stored by a stallion who died several years ago. The contract agreement is that additional stud fees are not due until subsequent ICSI embryos are born alive and stand. At which point, if I don’t pay the additional stud fee, the stallion owner will not put the mare on the breeding report, and therefore will not have a breeders certificate to release, and foal would not get registered. Do warmblood registries have similar requirements for breeding reports?
I’m baffled that the entire horse industry does not know about this person. I was first introduced via the braiding industry. What she’s done to clients (that the rest of us have to try to fix and pick up the slack on), it’s amazing that people still hire her.
I was scantly aware that there were some pictures floating around of horses in poor condition, but this thread has really dug up how disgusting of a being (not even human) she is.
Mine are truly on free choice alfalfa and still require at least a ration balancer. No BCSs of 2, no protruding toplines, no grossly under muscled creatures showing clear signs of joint disorders and malnutrition. Oh, and the babies are appropriately lean with clean legs and round/filled in toplines. No need to starve to avoid issues; of which is laughable, since the research clearly indicates that underfeeding and malnutrition is a major reason for joint disorders in the growing horse.
Earlier on in one of these threads, knowledgeable folks explained that the stallion certificate requirement had pretty much disappeared from the WB registries, at least in North America, and they were using genetic testing. I expect the fact that most of this semen comes from Europe, is sold at high volume, passes from hand to hand, may be from deceased stallions or even business entities that have dissolved, contributed to the European breeders having no control over how WB semen was used. They wouldn’t know the North American breeders or have much say in the NA registries.
Apparently WB stallion owners increased their semen prices in response to splitting doses for ICSI and some are trying to reinstitute contracts. But those can be hard to enforce internationally.
So apparently it’s a free for all.
Oh wow. Thanks for that. It probably got lost in the other 600 billion posts on here. Seems crazy to me, but again, different worlds.
I can see how in the AQHA, everyone in the same country, breed show circuits, registry, it would be much easier for the stallion owners to keep tabs on the breeders and foals and enforce contracts. And a breeder wouldn’t want to offend a stallion owner and not be able to do business in future.
I suspect that the stallion owners in Europe may have prioritized semen sales as an income stream and certainly some of these old frozen straws may predate widespread ICSI. Also those stallions have such huge reputations that a few crap foals in the North American backwoods won’t harm their reputations.
I actually hadn’t given it much thought until reading these threads. I’m not in the market for a WB, so haven’t paid attention. But now I see all kinds of small scale or backyard breeders offering young stock that is No Name Mare x Big Name Stallion. Mostly it’s more coherent breeding goals than Kate. But the Big Name Stallion is the sales hook. It’s a little like having a “designer high end luxury” brand open a store front in a discount outlet mall, and sell lower tier merchandise with the same logo.
I’m sure sourcing Big Name Stallion semen for your OTTB or Canadian Warm Blood mare is going to improve on the mare. But it’s not going to get you the world beating foal you’d get from that stallion plus a top mare. And the colt may or may not be the best local option. But he will cost more and you can say he’s “out of Big Name Stallion.”
Breeding up to better stallions is certainly a thing. It’s the theory behind US cavalry remount stallions and also standing quality draft stallions (or bulls) at government stations in the 19th century to improve local agriculture.
But I do think there’s a little bit of brand name recognition at play too, where the low end breeders hope the stallion name will carry everything.
Perhaps too almost everyone who is breeding WB small scale is buying Big Name frozen semen from Europe? Often on the secondary re-sale markets? How often do I see a young WB that is by a local or regional stallion? Whereas in other breeds, that’s quite common.
Just because it is one of those things that I always notice when people mix it up…
A foal is “by” a stallion, and “out of” a mare.
When people say their horse is “out of” a certain stallion… I automatically assume they are not a breeder… hobby or otherwise. And just trying to speak about their horse’s bloodlines. And that’s fine. I normally just smile and nod.
But since this thread is all about breeding, I thought it important to note the “by” vs. “out of” distinction.
If someone had bred a foal, and I was considering buying it, and they described the foal as “out of such and such stallion”
I would immediately make a mental note and seriously question whether they are an educated breeder. I would also very likely be disinclined to buy the foal from that breeder. Because that’s such a basic detail about correct terminology. And if the breeder got that wrong… I would wonder what else they were a bit ignorant about…
I think this is also a pretty broad statement, and not necessarily accurate.
Some specific warmblood stallion owners did institute new pricing and contractual terms in recent years, due to the increase in ICSI. Paul Schokemöhle Stallions did, I believe. But… that really only applies to frozen doses. And those are some of the most in demand stallions in the world, with significant international demand. And I think there are certain terms in some of the contracts that pertain to live foal guarantees, needing to go through multiple cycles to get a mare in foal, etc.
For lesser well known stallions, or for breeding with fresh cooled doses, I don’t think prices have really changed all that much. Most stallion owners go to considerable expense to train and compete their boys and get them licensed, and then to make them available to mare owners. I think the ROI is actually negative for many stallion owners, regardless of ICSI, simply because of low volume. Mare owners have many many many options to choose from. And breeding of warmbloods and warmblood crosses in North America? The volume is pretty low compared to other breeds.
I’m assuming that’s prevalent in all breeds and circles. In AQHA, most of the big HUS and Hunter sires back in the day were by western stallions and out of TB mares who were often off the track. Lots of backyard breeders thought they could just get any random cheap, rangy, broken, if even crappy, TB mare off the track, breed her to the flavor of the month sire, and produce the next coming of Skys Blue Boy or Coats N Tails or the like. Educated and dedicated breeders know that’s not the case. They also feed their horses, so there’s that 
I am reminded of a quote from a Bedouin horse breeder: “In America, horses have no dams.”
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