I see it on quarter horse threads often. What am I missing?
I think it’'s a different way of saying a certain horse is by a certain sire. Instead of saying " Bucky is sired by Dobbin" it’s phrased as Bucky is “the own son of Dobbin.”
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Weird isn’t it? As if "son of " isn’t clear enough.
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I think it’s an attempt to be more specific. There are people still selling their “King-bred” quarter horses, and we all fully know that King isn’t any closer than 5 generations back on anybody’s papers.
Or to use one more recent, Highbrow Cat. There are “Highbrow Cat-bred” foals being born, that are out of a Highbrow Cat son or daughter, but there are also a few "own son/daughter"s being bred each year too. At this point, there are foals being born the same year who might have Highbrow Cat as a sire, grandsire, or great-grandsire. So it’s sometimes a helpful distinction, even if it’s redundant.
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When some folks will say “son of Stallion X”, they could mean the direct or “own” son, the grandson, the great grandson, or the great-great grandson, etc., of Stallion X. I’ve always understood “own” son to mean the direct son, sired by the generationally-closest stallion in the pedigree.
I’ve always thought of it as a direct offspring as opposed to second or more generation back. Basically what Compadre says above.
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I get that, but the question being, why would anyone refer to the “grand-son” of a sire as a “son”? Why the “own” designation? Do breeders of AQHA stock refer to horses from a sire line as “sons of” that sire when they aren’t?
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They might not be referring to a grandson as a “son.” More likely they are saying something like ," This horse is by Stallion X," when it’s actually a grandson and not an own son.
Basically if some folks were not deceptive about it, the others wouldn’t feel the need to double emphasize the fact that it is the horse’s very own first generation directly immediate offspring.
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Oh. Well the term “by” means a son or daughter of. So the term “own” is used as a response to other people’s deception about the actual sire or dam. How odd that such a thing would be necessary, especially when pedigrees are so easily accessible.
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Back in the day it meant the foal was bred by the people standing the stallion, from their own mares. As compared to an outside program. That’s meaningful if the stallion owner’s program is well respected and the stallion bred outside mares of variable quality
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Usually I think it means the person writing the ad doesn’t know what they are talking about.
I was under the impression, as vxf11 said, that it was to refer to a the son of a famous stallion that was bred with intention to stay with the breeder and eventually replace sire. I see it all the times in Craig’s list ads & I am fairly confident in assuming that in most of them it doesn’t truly apply.
Is “own daughter” a thing? This sounds even more suspicious.
Whatever - maybe it is one of those phrases that has now changed to mean what people previously incorrectly assumed it meant.
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Thank you so much for the explanation!
If my ask about the “King-bred” phenomenon, the one where the sire in question is several generations back. After you say that, the onus is on the buyer to read the pedigree and see how line-bred to him, or how dilute that pedigree is, correct?
From a genetics point of view (and assuming anything other than close in-breeding within that stallion’s set of offspring, I’d think that the genetic effect of that horse 4 or 5 generations back was minimal. It gets more complicated than that, of course, since the breed as a whole could be relatively inbred. But my point is that I wonder if savvy buyers are in the business of figuring out for themselves just that the advertisement of “King-bred” or, “Foundation bred” means for horses many generations down from the horses they are naming.
Thank God we don’t have that terminology in TBs.
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