JC / Railbird - And Yet They Continue

And Yet They Continue

To take just one example, the racehorses that descend from the popular sire Mr. Prospector make, on average, 30 percent fewer starts in their careers than do horses from other sire lines…. The progeny of that other supersire, Storm Cat, show similar, if not quite so extreme, fragility.

A committee is at work on a durability stats database for breeders, but disagreements hinder its development.
Related: Superfecta asks, “Who would you geld today?”

Posted by JC in Breeders/Breeding on 05/06/2008 @ 5:00 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter

2 Comments

The particularly frustrating part of the glacial move toward durability for me is that the statistics are all out there, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a movement to centralize access.
Of course, I don’t understand why people breed to about half the high-priced stallions out there either; at at least one farm whose name I won’t mention, the woman who gave the tour said as we left one of the stallions something along the lines of, ‘of course, about half his foals are crooked.’
Were that documented somewhere, presumably he wouldn’t be such a hot commodity (and if there were a real rating body evaluating breeding he’d be gelded after consistently cranking out unsound foals).
It’s all so simple on paper!

Posted by Superfecta on May 6, 2008 @ 6:41 pm

It always comes back to the fundamentals of oversight, transparency, access to information …

Posted by Jessica on May 6, 2008 @ 9:02 pm

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