If I didn’t also want to be owning and showing my stallion just because I think he’s a super cool horse and I like him, there is a 0.0% chance that stud fees could cover the cost to put a performance record on him to make him even interesting for someone to use, much less actually come out ahead overall. Strangely, the hunter type stallions that have minimal performance records seem to get many more bookings than the ones with high dollar show campaigns to their resume.
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Or everytime you want to use liquid nitrogen to freeze a skin wart on a dog that the owner was adamant be done TODAY.
Of course this was an old tank from the dark ages. I do kind of miss having the cryofreeze unit. I don’t know if anyone still uses them. I had mixed results on sarcoids.
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That’s the smartest move for most people. Even if you have a fantastic proven mare, and breed to a fantastic proven stallion, there is no guarantee of what the foal will be. With something already on the ground, you have a better shot of knowing what they will be at least.
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Which is doubly nuts if a breeder ascribes to the theory that a stallion can only throw a foal as good as his dam (the sire’s dam).
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Also an excellent point. The dam line on BOTH sides is so important.
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Love this!
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The thing that most amazes me with this whole business model is marketing these horses as ammy material.
I mean, they may well be (as in not talented enough for the big leagues), but the idea of dropping $40 K on a baby, then, assuming it doesn’t kill itself doing stupid baby horse things, you’ve still got years of board and training and farrier and vet bills before the first time you go through the in gate.
I can’t imagine the market is booming for that.
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If I were advising this hypothetical ammy client, I would advise them to spend 40 - 60K on something in its early teens that needed to step down a level or two.
Assuming the ammy wasn’t delusional and didn’t think they were going to take this baby all the way to Grand Prix in either dressage or jumping, they would get a lot more joy in the saddle a lot sooner with an older horse that needed a step down job.
And that’s assuming that the in utero or weanling foal was well and truly purpose bred on both the top and bottom; it’s not even considering the weird crosses in poor condition that Shearer is shilling.
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I’m always amazed at the people who think they can breed anything and predict the outcome with any degree of certainty. As any human with siblings can tell you, it just does not work out that way, even if the full siblings often have some traits in common.
I knew somebody who has two ponies that are full siblings who are completely dissimilar in both type and movement. They don’t even look like they’re the same breed, much less out of the same mare by the same stallion. They’re both perfectly nice ponies, but not at all alike.
The funniest part is the person got those two ponies from different places at different times with no idea at all that they were related. They were just looking at the papers of the two ponies a year or so later, and said, hey, wait a minute… Lol.
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Now THAT is a great story!
In the early 90s my dad and I went to look at a driving pair of full siblings, arab/Welsh crosses IIRC.
Both nice ponies, but the mare was about 13/13.1 and a flashy mover. The gelding was about 14/14.1 with daisy cutter gaits.
Both nice ponies and you could drive them together, but they were not a pair for our purposes.
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I breed working western Arabians, and can assure you that the foals that I produce are VERY predictable in their phenotypes. This is because I understand and utilize the power of line breeding. I KNOW what my babies will and can do because they are carefully bred for a specific purpose.
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Not horse but we bred a cow to a bull 3 times.
First calf black and white
2nd calf chestnut, not called that in cattle world, like Dad.
3rd calf grey like Mum.
This. Educated breeders can predict pretty well what offspring should be like. That’s how we breed for purpose. Sure a maiden mare may be a bit more unknown, especially if she comes from lines you’re a little less familiar with; not knowing quite as well what genes skipped her generation that will crop up in the next. But that’s where studying lines, their traits, and tendencies come in. Knowing strengths and weaknesses of various lines. What traits may show back up, and which ones have been bred out. Then again, I’m also the person who will argue with anyone who says you can’t judge movement on anything younger than a year. Hell I’m judging them on their first canter steps as soon as they figure out how to move one foot in front of the other.
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Funnily enough, I think the two ponies I mentioned are also Welsh/Arab crosses. Maybe that genetic mix does not gel together consistently or something. Lol.
Regarding being able to predict exactly what a young horse will turn out to be based on the breeding, I’m pretty sure there are lots of people who do race horses in a big way who drop millions on the babies that turn out to have lifetime earnings of $5000 or whatever.
You might have better odds with some bloodlines than others, but still… horses.
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The Arabian world with different bloodlines for different types is so familiar to me that I’m baffled how people don’t understand how it works!
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Yes. The breeder of my PRE produces a very consistent result/type of horse. She knows her stallions well and her brood mares just as well. I’ve never seen a horse from her that I thought, “hmm, not sure about this one.”
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Crossing two breeds is very different from breeding carefully within one breed. There is still variance in performance within a breed but many purebred animals are quite homozygous genetically. Crossing Arab x Welsh, TB, QH will usually get you a nice animal but no reason the genes will shake out the same in two siblings.
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Exactly. I would expect Welaras to be very different phenotypically. I would expect PREs to breed true. And warmbloods, given their open studbooks 
are somewhere in the middle.
I have been exceptionally lucky, but I also do/have done a ton of research including traveling to Europe multiple times and falling down a lot of rabbit holes. It takes more than breeding to a stallion that catches your eye. What do his foals look like, move like, jump like? What is his damline? Is his sire still available, and what has he produced?
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Even though you might expect PRE’s to breed “true” (whatever your definition of that is), it does still require much thought and knowing your lines, sires and dams. I’ve seen some questionable PRE’s in the US, so it’s not so easy, I guess. Are your odds better than with an “open stud book”…probably so.
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