b4breeding

In one of my early blogs (originally an article for Breeding Matters magazine) I outlined my approach to pedigree matching by using analogies from cooking, knitting and land use mapping to explain what I meant.

In this blog, I’m throwing a another strange analogy into the mix – the pedigree of a horse as a steam engine.

Building the power of your mare’s family.

Que?

Visualise the pedigree of a horse as the engine room of a steam train. That’s where you find the hard working genes of quality mares, sires and damsires stoking the boiler that will keep a family performing consistently on a foal to winner basis, and over many generations. These are the hot, sweaty, muscular genes that are heads-down/butts-up scooping the coal into the furnace so that the resulting foals can produce results.

These genes  (and I’m not just referring to the heart size/ “x factor’) provide the two most important elements of great performance – power, which in turn drives speed. It’s something that can be build up and maintained over time, with the right pedigree matches – keeping the fire stoked, as it were. Or the furnace can be allowed to die down, and strong families run out of steam due to poor breeding choices over a few generations and it can take one helluva effort to get those coals going again.

The other two key elements of a family’s great performance – temperament and conformation – might be visualised as the domain of the engine driver, tapping into the power from the boiler and regulating how it is used, ensuring the mechanical parts of the train are well oiled and working correctly, and steering the train from stop to stop (or foal to foal) along the track of time.

There is much debate about where a horse’s temperament and conformation mainly come from. It’s not as black and white as y chromosomes and x chromosomes, and it’s not as simple as nature or nurture. Anyone who breeds knows that some foals will have a similar temperament to their dam, others seem to take after the sire. Some sires “stamp” their foals more than others, and some dams do the same. And often you get some aspect of a foal (markings are the visually obvious one) that is a throw back to the past or seems to come out of the blue.

But there are things a breeder can do to maximise the chances of improving conformation and avoiding bad temperament traits – some by breeding choices and some by the way a mare/foal are managed. I recall wise words from Andrew Grierson and Sandy Yarndley when I did my articles about ‘stamping’ – warning about blaming or crediting too much about temperament on the sire, with Sandy noting that the temperament of a foal is often more influenced by the people who handle it,  and Andrew pointing out that the foal spends much of its formative months with the mare, and she is likely to be more of an influence on the foal’s temperament than the sire’s genes.

So in a way, the breeder’s role is to make “engine room” choices that keep the fire crew strong and happy feeding the boiler, and “engine driver” choices that maximise the chances of staying on track to your desired destination.

Toot! Toot!

Or as a favourite childhood book of mine, Margaret Wise Brown’s “The train to Timbuctoo” put it: “Slam! bang! grease the engine, pull out the throttle and give it the gun!”