Nestled within the rolling hills of south central England, a pasture within Henry Edmunds’ Cholderton Stud farm makes most Cleveland Bay owners gasp the first time they visit. Edmunds’ family has been breeding Cleveland Bays for more than 100 years, and in one of the pastures, 13 purebreds stand together in what is nearly as breathtaking a sight as the ancient monuments just a few miles away at Stonehenge.

Right now, it’s the only pasture in the world where you can see this many purebred Cleveland Bays together in one herd.

But supporters of the critically endangered equine are trumpeting a new breeding management tool that may have the power to make herds like Edmunds’ less of an anomaly.

Known as SPARKS, or the Single Population Animal Records Keeping System, the new acronym circulating around Cleveland Bay circles right now is a computer database that works with a genetic analysis program called GENES to help breeders sustain and strengthen small populations of endangered animals.

The high-tech “family tree” software isn’t new itself; zoological organizations around the world have been using the programs for decades to centrally manage populations of zoo animals separated by miles or even continents. The genetic software has played a key role in reviving endangered populations of Sumatran tigers, blackfooted ferrets and even the Przewalski horse, which bordered on extinction several years ago when the last 12 horses were captured in Mongolia and brought into captivity.

“We’re the first equine or domestic breed organization to use this technology in our reproductive programs,” said Scott Smith, who raises Cleveland Bays at Peters Creek Farm near Madison, Ga.

Smith attended the general meetings last fall of both the Cleveland Bay Horse Society and the Cleveland Bay Horse Society of North America (in England and Massachusetts, respectively) where he heard British Cleveland Bay breeder Andy Dell formally present SPARKS’ capabilities.

Dell had been struggling for years to digitize the Cleveland Bays’ studbooks, but his efforts were hampered not just by the sheer amount of records that reach back to the 1800s, but by the fact that humans often made mistakes when recording the records. And so the system crashed. Again. And again.

After many technical inquiries, Dell was finally able to integrate the Cleveland Bay’s complete genealogy and achieve the prized output–globalized genetic information sheets for all the Cleveland Bay breeders in England, the United States and other parts of the world.

They may look fairly simple—standard-sized sheets of paper, front and back, listing the status of every current breeding Cleveland Bay—but the implications of the sheets are staggering. Most importantly, they calculate a coefficient for each Cleveland Bay that illustrates the extent to which each horse is genetically related to the rest of the breed. Furthermore, the software makes recommendations as to what breeding pairs would continue to safely lower the relatedness of the breed and increase genetic diversity among the horses.

“People sat down around the table at these two conferences and their jaws just dropped,” Smith said. “We’ve talked about saving the breed for generations, and now it looks like we’re actually going to do it. Morale in the Cleveland Bay breed is very high right now.”

The technology is channeling new energy into saving a breed of which only about 500 purebred horses exist worldwide. For the past 40 years or so, Cleveland Bay enthusiasts have concentrated on creating a sustainable, global population of the horses while at the same time decreasing the equines’ genetic inter-relatedness. But because SPARKS puts the entire genetic history of the Cleveland Bay literally at the owners’ fingertips, efforts to save the breed can now be undertaken with much more scientific precision.

Cleveland Bays And Genetics

The full scope of the software’s impact can’t really be understood without a brief history of the Cleveland Bay and basic genetics. The breed is actually the oldest indigenous British equine and the foundation blood of horses such as the Trakehner, Standardbred, Morgan, Oldenburg and, even, the Clydesdale.

The Cleveland Bay is thought to have originated in the 17th century when native bay-colored mares were crossed with Oriental stallions in northern England. The result was a sturdy bay horse that became known for its durability, sensibility and success in nearly every discipline from hunting to driving.

Smith and his wife Stephanie are recent converts. Three years ago, the couple gave up breeding Hanoverians when they discovered the Cleveland Bay possessed more of the strong-boned athleticism and dressage-prowess they had been trying to produce.

The Smiths found most of the same commendable traits everyone else finds when they undertake some initial Cleveland Bay research. But most importantly, Scott couldn’t find a single Cleveland who was a carrier of osteochondritis disecans, the genetic disorder that had afflicted several of the Peters Creek Hanoverians.

Centuries of pure bloodlines have pro-tected the Cleveland Bay from many genetic disorders; ironically, they also nearly killed the breed altogether. The British closed the studbook to outside blood in 1884, a decision that may not have had an impact if hundreds of thousands of horses, Cleveland Bays included, hadn’t quietly given their lives serving humans in the mechanical age and then during World War I.

Today, only a small fraction of Cleveland Bays are left, when you consider that the worldwide population of horses is thought to be somewhere around 60 to 65 million. The future of the Cleveland Bay is so dire, in fact, that the American Livestock Breed’s Conservancy defines the Cleveland Bay as not just “rare,” but “critical,” meaning the breed’s numbers do not exceed 200 animals in the United States.

Currently, about 123 pure Cleveland Bays live in North America. That’s close to the total number of horses you might see at a local schooling show.

“There was a huge crisis in the 1960s when we realized how few of these horses were left,” said Scott. “Since then we’ve been on the rebound.”

Yet Colin Green, an English Cleveland Bay breeder and member of the CBHS, said that even as recently as the mid 1990s, many breeders were just not aware of the structure of the breed and the consequences of their personal breeding choices.

“Through the traditional methods of stallion selection based solely on studying pedigrees and looking at the stallion phenotype over and over through generations, much of the origins of the breed were lost and are now irreplaceable. Our genetics were greatly depreciated.”

Any doubters only needed to hear Dell scientifically support this claim at the conferences this fall. After finally getting SPARKS to accept all of the studbook data, the computer program moved the numbers around in GENES and spit out an alarming result.

The software identified 182 “founders” of the Cleveland Bay, or rather, horses whose bloodlines were uniquely individual and unrelated to any other horse in the breed. Through generations of careless management, those 182 lines of unique blood were reduced to a mere 2.5 lines.

“That means we have lost the equivalent of the genetic material from 179.5 Cleveland Bays; that’s almost 180 horses,” Dell said sternly to the general meetings of the CBHS and CBHSNA.

In reality, it’s a severe case of genetic drift in which both nature and humans are at fault. Genetic drift, or the loss of genetic material over time, is natural in large populations, but the affects can be devastating when only small amounts of genetic material are available in the first place.

That’s why genetic pedigree programs like SPARKS and GENES are so valuable. As the studbook keeper maintains the database information and releases new data sheets each year, breeders know exactly what horses they need to mate to maintain genetic diversity in the population.

A New Era In Management

Worldwide digital management of endangered populations was an idea pioneered in the 1970s by an astute conservationist named Ulysses Seal. With the support of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, Seal pushed for the development of the International Species Inventory (now Information) System, an organization that now manages a centralized computer database of animals living in zoos everywhere. Currently, ISIS houses data on more than 2 million species from 600 zoos around the world.

“Prior to the digital revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s, zoos operated independently in their breeding programs,” said Kathy Traylor-Holzer, a rare breed specialist who describes a situation that sounds strikingly similar to the Cleveland Bay’s history.

Traylor-Holzer is the national SPARKS studbook keeper for the Sumatran, Indochinese and Amur (Siberian) tigers. Officially, she’s the program officer of the World Conservation Union, but her work with endangered tigers has had her analyzing the data from SPARKS and GENES at offices at the Minnesota Zoo for nearly 14 years.

“The development of ISIS in 1973 changed breeding efforts from completely random to completely coordinated. They developed systems like SPARKS [the database of a breed or species’ genetic information], ARKS [a similar program used by zoos] and GENES [which analyzes the data input in SPARKS] and allowed us to analyze and manage the populations as a whole. Without these programs it’s nearly im-possible to manage small populations on a global level.”

For all endangered populations, from Amur tigers to Cleve-land Bays, the most important calculation gleaned from the SPARKS and GENES software is something called a “mean kinship” coefficient.

This coefficient is a number between 0 and 1 that measures how related a particular horse is to the rest of the population of Cleveland Bays. Horses with very rare blood have mean kinships closer to zero and are considered priority breeders. Likewise, horses with more common blood have mean kinships closer to one and are considered less important (but not unimportant) to breed. As Smith joked: “Everyone needs someone to make babies with.”

“We never want SPARKS to impede people from breeding more purebreds,” he explained. “It’s a tool to help us, not hinder us from breeding more horses. All the Clevelands are important to sustain the population, not just the ones with extremely rare blood.”

In the data sheets produced by this program, each Cleveland Bay is placed in a corresponding banding system from A to G. SPARKS-compliant breeding requires owners to breed to a stallion in the same band or an adjacent band because these pairings will systematically and safely reduce the mean kinship of the overall population.

For example, when Cleveland Bay mare owners receive this year’s SPARKS data sheets in February, they can immediately see where their mares sit in relation to the whole population (stallion owners are not given SPARKS sheets because the CBHS and CBHSNA agreed it may invite solicitations). If the mare is in Band F, SPARKS recommends the mare breed to a stallion in bands E, F or G. For each E, F or G stallion listed next to Mare F’s name, the program lists the studs’ mean kinships as well as the mean kinship of the potential foal Mare F would produce with each stallion.

Essentially, the data sheets help breeders choose pairings that will give the progeny a lower mean kinship than both of the parent animals. Matings that give the progeny a higher mean kinship than both the parent animals are discouraged, as are any matings that give the progeny a mean kinship near .24, an indication of inbreeding.

Most importantly, the program strongly discourages genetic pairings between horses in widely dissimilar bands, as this would result in mixing common blood with rare blood, an irreversible genetic no-no. Although such pairings sharply decrease the mean kinship average initially, over the long-term it would produce a population of horses who were more, not less, related.

Traylor-Holzer said it’s easiest to imagine the situation in terms of candy.

“Say it’s Christmas and you have a bag of mostly green M&Ms with a few red M&Ms,” she explained. “You can breed all the green ones together and get more green and all the red ones to get more red, but if you breed a green to a red you’re going to and up with an M&M that is half and half.

Now, every time after that, you can never get more of the rare red M&Ms without breeding more green M&Ms too. You’ve permanently linked the common blood with the rare blood and there’s no way to control it anymore.”

Yet even if breeders cooperate fully with the genetic software’s recommendations, the system won’t work without someone to maintain and constantly update the information. Because SPARKS only provides a temporary snapshot of the breed, the data will change each year when new horses are born and their mean kinships are added to the system. Genetic material is consequently redistributed and horses may change bands. Dell has assumed the initial directorship of this game of genetic musical chairs, but he also plans to train other Cleveland Bay Horse Society members to manage the system.

More Obstacles To Overcome

After understanding SPARKS, some Cleveland Bay owners are faced with another challenge. According to SPARKS’ suggestions, some mare owners, especially owners of low-banded mares, have few stallions from which to breed. Furthermore, because many Cleveland Bays live on their native turf in England, it’s possible that the majority (if not all) of an American owner’s best matches may live across the ocean.

“This is where we’re really running into roadblocks now,” Smith explained.

Frozen semen isn’t the problem; it’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s quarantine restrictions that have discouraged British breeders for years from importing semen to the United States.

“It costs breeders thousands of dollars more to import semen to the U.S. rather than Australia or New Zealand because the USDA won’t let collections be taken from the stallion while he’s in quarantine for CEM [contagious equine metritis] swabs.”

Smith is currently petitioning the USDA to allow collections from stallions while they are in quarantine, a move he said will benefit all breeds, not just the Cleveland Bay.

“Until now, we all just kind of avoided the issue and bred with horses on our home turf. But with what we know now about sustaining the Cleveland Bay population, some of us don’t have a choice–we have to breed with horses overseas. And there should be a way to do so economically. If we can’t do it economically, we can’t stay in business to breed at all.”

Smith’s explanation underscores an important point: besides revolutionizing the physical breeding process, SPARKS is forcing Cleveland Bay owners to fully confront the problems that have impeded their progress and come up with new solutions.

The Smiths founded the independent Cleveland Bay Alliance to give the horses more of an identity in the United States; SPARKS has only given them more ammunition. Britain has established subsidy programs that pay the owners of rare stallions a small fee for their participation in a new Cleveland Bay semen collection scheme.

To function properly, SPARKS requires cooperation amongst all the breeders. As a result, the minor bureaucratic quarrels that plague any small organization full of independent, motivated members (including the CBHS and CBHSNA) have largely been set aside as Cleveland Bay owners concentrate on a new future.

“This is where Cleveland Bay owners really take the credit for this movement,” Smith said. “We’ve all agreed to do something harder to make it better for the breed. We all have an obligation now to do our paperwork and coordinate our breeding efforts.”

Some traditionalists are still skeptical of the system, especially because it can limit a breeder’s options of potential stallions. But despite the challenges, the genetic software has gained an amazing amount of support. In England, Nigel Cowgill, Breed Committee Chairman and current studbook editor of the CBHS, has gained sponsorships from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and a major British tack company to help financially reward owners who produce SPARKS-compliant foals. Many members are currently trying to generate similar sponsorships in the States.

CBHS member Colin Green is careful to explain that the new knowledge from the genetic software is not taking the place of traditional methods. The personal appraisal of Cleveland Bay stallions and assessments of phenotypes will still play a crucial role in the breeding process, he said.

But it’s interesting to note that in a few years nobody will be able to differentiate between pure Cleveland Bays who were bred because of what their owners saw on the SPARKS and GENES data sheets and Cleveland Bays who were born before the information became available. Physically, the horses will all continue to look very much the same as they have for the past 400 years: strong, regal, athletic, attentive, and of course, brilliantly bay. The biggest difference may simply be the size of the herd.