b4breeding

(Stamp of success Part 4 of 6)  Andrew Grierson from Woodlands Stud believes a focus on the sire alone can be misleading.  “Half the genes come from the mare, so it is a bold statement to say that a sire ‘stamps’ his progeny,” he comments. “However you can see sire lines that produce certain qualities. For example, Bettor’s Delight comes from a sire line that produces sound horses. His foals tend to have good feet, good conformation, and don’t break down. It’s about bone density.”

Bettors Delight is a smaller (15.1 hand) stallion, but like Courage Under Fire’s reputation for heart and gait, Bettor’s Delight offsets any size concerns with a growing reputation for leaving progeny with soundness and speed. “New Zealand breeders have to get out of the mentality that a small horse is no good,” he says.

Andrew Grierson points out that temperament is both a genotype and phenotype characteristic (governed by genes but also developed by interaction with environmental factors). So if a mare has a nervy temperament and the foal spends much of its formative months with the mare, she is likely to be more of an influence on the foal’s temperament than the sire’s genes.