…and the state of Warmblood breeding in this day and age.
http://www.eurodressage.com/2019/04/…reeding-crisis
Honestly at this distance I can’t make heads or tails of this institutional infighting and there is nothing concrete in here about the actual quality of horse being created. If the author was saying they were breeding unsound horses or genetic disease or crazy horses, I could get inside with that. But honestly I can’t evaluate the validity of what she is saying because I don’t know the players.
Yes, I’m sure the article was aimed predominantly toward Hanoverian breeders. The “quality of the horses being created”
was explained in the article, it seemed to me…
No dog in this fight, but the idea that 20% of the stallions cover 80% of the mares is alarming from a population genetics standpoint. I wonder whether horses have been protected from the same fate as dogs only by their singleton births and longer generation gap.
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Is this not true of many breeds? And also stallions are a tiny % of the male horse population.
If you want to see deliberate bad breeding then look up halter Arabs and QH.
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Honestly, much of this article strikes an “old man shouts at clouds” meme note. Deriding the internet and how it has changed the way of engagement, as compared to “the good old days” (essentially) is out of touch and unrealistic. We live in a modern world with modern challenges. Verbands (and breeders) must adapt and overcome.
Breeding goals change. Breeding access changes. Breeding directions change.
Reforming the boards is rarely ever a bad idea. Likewise, I would scrutinize the access and ability to influence Verbands that one large player has (Paul S and Oldenburg are a good example of this - but that is hardly a “new” crisis!) and figure ways to minimize the impact of what is essentially shaping up to be conglomerates, can have on direction.
Why, say, is the idea of young breeders that are internationally connected, considered to be a problem? Should we be promoting insular and isolationist verbands and registry policy? I think that’s hogwash - and the fact that I can hop into my email and reach out to successful, knowledgeable individuals regardless of their distance to me should be considered a strength and a benefit to use going forward, rather than a crisis to be alarmed about.
The idea of clinging bitterly to a geographic based community effectively isolated anyone who isn’t in Europe, or by, say, Hilltop in the US. “Too bad, you’re out of luck”… I should think not! Isn’t that what North American breeders have been fighting against for the last decade?
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i agree with the article totally and this is not the first article of this nature, david pincus wrote in the Horse Magazine a few years back that dressage breeding has lost its way. There are no geographical borders anymore for stallions , its all about glossy advertising and yes of course the biggest marketers of stallions have a lion sized share of the market. Not that there has ever been much direction for breeders anyway and even less now. Facebook has alot to answer for , we only see the best from europe on there we dont see the ordinary ones that are bred in the mass production that exists there and this leads to a false conception on the part of breeders and buyers. As someone who has been breeding for a long time i hate the new system of facebook dominating everything. As for stallions, it is all about selling semen as it always has been but in a very different way, far more aggressively done and we have a long series of big black huge trotters to choose from. i dont like the way things are heading at all and i am glad i am not a new breeder coming into all this
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