b4breeding

(The art and science of breeding Part 2 of 3)

In my view, there is no “magic bullet” for successful pedigree matching. It always amuses me how double ups are bolded in the Sales catalogue pedigrees, as if that somehow signaled a highly significant factor we should automatically pay more for. In some cases, maybe. But often not.

My personal approach is to look for things that are complementary rather than the same – “what likes what” rather than “like with like”.

It’s a bit like cooking.

You don’t really need to follow a strict recipe for a good fruitcake. If you gather the basic ingredients (flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and dried fruit) in the right proportions you can put a cake together. The cake is the result of mixing things that aren’t the same, but complement each other. The total is greater than the sum of its parts.

Too much liquid and it won’t set. Too much flour and it will crumble. Increasing one good ingredient a lot can throw the ‘whole’ out of balance.

In breeding terms, doubling up a recognised genetic speed factor may reduce stamina or increase risky temperament traits, and inbreeding or loading up with a common dominant sire may demand subsequent outcross breeding to get a family back in balance.

Getting your proportions right and blending them into a consistent mixture is vital for success. In this fruitcake analogy, the main ‘ingredients’ might be all the factors you put into your breeding decision mix.

For me, that means conformation, character, commercial factors, family performance, and pedigree, with commercial factors being the ‘sugar’ content I can reduce if I need to go ‘lite’ for financial reasons. If you are focusing on pedigree matching alone, these main ‘ingredients’ might be more specific phenotype and genotype inputs such as speed, gait, stamina, or perhaps so-called golden crosses or perhaps relative positions within the proposed family tree e.g. 4x4x4 to Meadow Skipper, or the Rasmussen theory, or specific dam or sire lines you want to include.

You are focused on proportions and achieving a certain balance when complementary things are combined.

However there’s more to a fruitcake than those obvious ingredients. It will turn out flat and tasteless without some small but vital items – a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, or a dash of vanilla and almond essences.

These are the things that will lift your cake to another level (literally, in the case of baking powder!) 

In breeding terms, these small but key ingredients are what I want to find when I go looking for what ‘nicks’ with what, and when I learn that a sire stamps his foals with a longer stride or a mental toughness or better bone density, or when I use a new feeding programme that gives foals a stronger foundation.

You might seek those ingredients from an “instant packet” (a breeding consultant’s or other expert’s recommendations) or from reading lots of recipe books (study and research) or by developing your own highly tuned taste buds (your own breeding theory or intuition), it doesn’t matter. In the end, the proof of the fruitcake is in the eating.

And that is why breeding successful racehorses is a fascinating challenge and the search for the right ingredients continues.