Ah. The infamous “they.”
How about you link to this plethora of posts describing that?
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So, you’ve “read” this but have no real experience having seen it. I don’t doubt that there are some shady people who don’t abide by the rules, however they are not the norm and they certainly don’t work at reputable breeding farms.
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I never said they’re the norm. I only said LC is not 100%, which is reality. I DO have friends in the TB breeding industry, not shady back yard breeders.
Your lack of personal experience is showing because I have never seen this attending dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds, of TB live covers.
You could not pay me to stand under the average TB race stallion to collect him. And I literally did an entire internship of collecting warmblood stallions. Collecting a stallion is a totally different skill set for both horse and handlers. Stallions who can be both hand collected and jump mares are true gems.
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Oh? But it was posts here describing TB stallions not jumping mares just a moment ago. Which you have not provided.
No reputable breeding farm is going to risk the registration of their foals on this.
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This being a mostly anonymous BB, it’s very easy for posters to claim experience they don’t have. For some reason this racing forum attracts more than a few people who try to sound like they know what they’re talking about when they don’t–and the more sensational their claims are, the more attention they receive.
No real TB breeder would ever admit on a public forum to using AI to produce a foal, on the off chance that the JC might be notified, able to deduce the poster’s identity, and rescind the foal’s registration.
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Your friends are shady if they do this, and if they’ve seen it done, they are hanging out with very shady breeders.
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The only problem with live cover is that one stallion can only cover so many mares.
Inseminating you can stretch the semen and use one batch to service more mares and mares that are almost but not quite standing, but will ovulate in the next few hours.
We had several stallions, all live cover and only one older one had one mare he didn’t care for, took at times a while for him to decide to cover her.
Guess she was not his type, but she had several very nice foals by him.
Practically all stallions would tease a bit, cover a mare and be done quickly.
Of course only with mares in real standing heat, if not no one waited around.
We never did use AI, we did test semen regularly to be sure all was ok.
We quit breeding in 1984, AI was just then seriously getting started.
The JC at that time seemed to be and may still be a monopoly minded group of men looking for their best interest and AI just was not what suited at that time.
There is a whole industry geared to handle moving TB mares around, many with foals, back and forth, which is really a bad idea for so many, if nothing else because some are so valuable, why risk them?
No telling what the TB industry would be today if they had embraced AI when it became viable, the world has changed since then in at that time unpredictable ways.
I am surprised that by now someone/something has not changed their mind.
AI is all around a better mousetrap when it comes to horse breeding.
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TB Stallions today, with expert management, may cover up to 300 mares in a season. This is possible because the mares are scanned and only put to the stallion at the optimum period of their ovulation cycle, when they are most receptive. Stallions are too valuable and too busy to risk getting double barrelled by a mare. Times past, a mare staying at the farm might be covered by the stallion two or three times over a period of days or the weeks of her cycle to ensure she caught. Modern Vet technology and skills make breeding a lot more certain. The mares move to the stallion because it is cheaper for the breeders. Times past, a stallion could of been “walked” from farm to farm by the stallion man but that just doesn’t make commercial sense any more.
This is a curious discussion. If someone wishes to breed TBs by AI, it is practically possible and chilled or frozen is widely available - but the resulting animal could not be registered as a TB. So breed a TB via AI and just call it an American WB or a Sport Horse or A Cuddly Pet. But there is no international market and no interest in that particular animal from a worldwide TB racing industry obsessed by pedigrees and performance.
Artificial Insemination, and other reproductive technology, is intrinsic to the WB industry because these animals are still competing, in dressage, show jumping etc. while simultaneously being used for breeding. AI has little to do with animal welfare. TBs prove themselves before retiring from racing and moving on to the breeding sheds. One might argue they have a more natural lifestyle.
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Many years ago, there was a Northern Dancer son standing in my area. Word was that he was simply not getting mares in foal. They brought in the best breeding vet in this area, and he started “reinforcing” all of the covers, probably with semen that he had collected off of a jump mare. The stallion was owned by one of the more elite owners in the industry. I’ve always thought that they really pushed the envelope on their practices, but no one ever questioned it, to my knowledge.
I can’t imagine committing to $$$ for a season, then rolling up to the farm and seeing them using questionable practices that might render the foal unregisterable.
I also don’t know how anyone could keep that a secret on any busy stud farm accepting outside mares.
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Right, but the best management to get the most live covers for a stallion still needs to move many of those mares to him for live cover.
That is not in the best interest of the mares and very young foals they may have with them.
That should have been an important consideration when they decided against AI and still are today against it half a century later.
I always thought that was questionable when we have better ways around that scenario, like AI.
We quit breeding for personal reasons in 1984 and a few months after, we had disbanded all but a few ranch mares and one stallion, the oil and gas market collapsed and, since that was the base of TB racing in the SW, it took several years to recuperate and it never again regained the previous level of interest.
Many still think, if AI in TB’s had been permitted, we may have today a thriving TB industry, not the piecemeal interest we have today, why so many smaller tracks eventually closed.
Quarter horses have a different market and not near as strong as TB racing did and still does today when comparing both.
As breeders and trainers, “TBs pay their way, quarter horses run at their own money”, is what we used to say.
There is so much more to all this, the breeding end of things just one part of a whole large industry racing and race tracks and betting are.
Maybe we in our smaller end of things don’t quite see the whole picture, why we can’t really judge how AI would fit in all of it?
It is? Why, if pretty much the whole TB industry is geared towards breeding for the track?
Or are there a lot of TB stallions out there aimed at the sport horse market, where the lack of papers from AI would not matter?
I don’t know how you define “a lot”, but it is a definite market, especially for Eventing. For instance ASB_Stars stood a registered TB stallion for sport horse breeding (I had one of his offspring).
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There were 17,000+ TB mares bred to TB stallions in the US last year.
I’m just guessing, but the number of those who were bred specifically for sport probably doesn’t even equal 1%. And that’s including all the Krazy Kolor Breeders plus the handful of people standing lovely sport TBs for eventing, etc.
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@MHM There are many people using TB for sport horses. Eventing, in particular, looks for TB blood. Even the big European WB “breeds” use TB stallions. There are today, according to Wikipedia, 10 TBs out of 140 stallions standing Celle, the Hanover State Stud. They are recognized as TB by an XX after their names in the pedigree. It was only at the recent Paris Olympics that the immense influence of TB blood was formally acknowledged, for the first time, in the info about the participating horses. Previously they could be described as “breeding unknown”. The World Breeding Federation for Sport Horses (WBFSH) provides the data and TB breeders are not members of the Federation. The objectives of the two groups of breeders are somewhat different.
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I watch a lot of FEI show jumping on YouTube. I’ve noticed that a lot of the commentators saying lately that a horse has, “…a lot of Blood…” I assume they are saying that the horse has a lot of Thoroughbred in its breeding.
@RHdobes563 Yes.
The European tradition is to use the term “cold blood” for draft horses and “hot blood” for TB, Arabs and a few other refined breeds. Therefore the “Warmblood” is created from a mix of cold and hot. More “blood” refers to the TB used to produce the “modern type” of highly athletic performance animals.
So of these people who are standing thoroughbreds as sport horse sires, do they offer frozen semen and the like?
This IS the way it is done. It is easy to tell who has actually been involved in breeding TBs or even near a breeding shed - and who has not.
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