Bouncing around the pasture beside his dam is the foal of your dreams. He’s alive and well, his legs are straight, or becoming so, and, at least in your eyes, he’s the cutest, most handsome little baby in the world. For a while, just the pure, vis-ceral pleasure of watching a mare and foal leaping and cavorting in grassy, green meadows ought to be enough for any horse breeder, and it probably is. For a while.

 

At some point, though, a large parade of choices begins to trek through your imagination. Will I keep my foal or sell him? Will I train him myself or have someone else do it? If I sell him, should I sell him as an unbroken weanling or yearling, or should I get him at least basically trained as a 2- or 3-year-old?

 

Each choice opens up new choices–and closes some others. Let’s say you decide to sell him. After all, you justified breeding your mare in the first place by counting the imaginary money. Now you have to assess his worth as a weanling, if that’s your chosen time to put him on the market.

 

Many American sport horse breeders bemoan the fact that it is very difficult to sell untrained babies. They will usually tell you the same story–Americans would generally rather pay much more for a ready-to-go 4- or 5-year-old than for a youngster they’ll need to train. The American sport horse industry, in general, hasn’t done a very good marketing job about the benefits of buying well-bred youngsters.

 

Pedigree is something that is quite objective, in that the performance of the offspring of a particular stallion or mare can be tracked. Yet, for all its objectivity, pedigree popularity is subject to all kinds of rising and falling tides of fortune, and is, therefore, almost more subjective than objective.

 

What is pedigree? Someone called it “present expectation of future success based upon the past performance of the parents and grandparents.” That’s not a bad definition because the key word is expectation, not guarantee.

 

Assume three bay Thoroughbred yearling colts are standing in a row. They all look and move essentially alike. Yet one is worth $1,500 at a Thoroughbred auction, the second will sell for $15,000, and the third will fetch a staggering $1.5 million. This is entirely based on the  pedigree, since all three are very correct individuals. Their buyers have reason to expect that these colts will run to their pedigrees, so they expect the two inexpensive babies to race in the claiming ranks, while the gold-plated youngster has the potential to win graded stakes.

 

Sadly for the high rollers, even Storm Cat, who stands for $500,000, gets fewer than 20 percent stakes winners. That means that for breeders who’ve just forked out half a million dollars for one mare to have one foal, that foal has 5-1 odds against his becoming a success on the race track. Put more bluntly, if the most expensive stallion in the world, bred to the best mares in the world, is successful fewer than one time out of five, what are the chances of two average horses producing a winning foal?

 

Yet hope springs eternal, and Seattle Slew, the 1977 Triple Crown winner and current top sire, was purchased as a yearling for $17,500. When Ted Coffin’s 1976 Olympic gold-medal three-day mare Bally Cor was conceived, her sire’s stud fee was $50. “Pedigree counts, but don’t count on it,” might be the cynic’s conclusion.

 

I’m not that much of a cynic. I think one way to realize the power of pedigree is to play this “what-if” scenario: What if we breed a heavy, unsound, choppy moving stallion, to a hot little, Thoroughbred mare who failed as a race horse? Are we apt to produce a calm, sound, fancy moving foal? What if we breed an attractive, sound, multiple stakes-winning Thoroughbred stallion to a big, sound, warmblood mare who was herself a winning show jumper on one of the smaller grand prix circuits? Aren’t our chances of obtaining an athletic sport horse infinitely greater in the second scenario? What analytical thinker could believe otherwise?

 

People who breed in America are apt to be whim breeders, not analytical students of pedigree and performance. Many of our European counterparts are much more knowledgeable. As USA Equestrian, our na-tional federation, be-gins to develop a much broader pedigree base and correlates those bloodlines to performance, Amer-ican breeders will be better positioned to make educated breeding decisions.

 

Another fact we have to deal with is that our cute foal, no matter how adorable, can be a real little monkey to catch, halter-break, and teach to lead. It’s amazing how strong those babies are, how much they can leap around, and how they can kick like mules. The sooner we can establish their respect and their trust, the less likely we are to get bullied by their antics. I think it’s a big mistake to let them be essentially untouched by human hands, except for various unpleasant episodes like worming, shots and castration, until they’re 1 or 2 years old.

 

The longer we wait to establish that we’re high on the pecking order, the bigger and tougher they can get.

 

Different trainers have differing methods for starting the schooling process. When I was about 20, I worked for a couple of summers for the Green Mountain Stock Farm in Randolph, Vt., home of the Lippitt Morgans.

 

One of my jobs was to break five or six yearlings to long-line, and ever since I’ve preferred that method. I’m not on their backs, so they can’t buck me off, and I can teach them to start and stop, to steer right and left, and to line drive all over the farm. By the time they’re ready to be ridden, they’re used to having harness flapping all over them, reins touching their flanks, a surcingle around their bellies, and a saddle on their backs.

 

Regardless of the method we use, the point is to get the youngsters desensitized to fearful sensations and alarming surroundings. I’ve long-lined young Thoroughbred stallions through my next-door neighbor’s farmyard, past cows, sheep, tractors, piles of firewood, white plastic-wrapped silage, and squawking chickens. By the time I’m ready to be on their backs, they’ve been there, done that, and are much less likely to spin and bolt.

 

Well-bred, well-schooled American sport horse youngsters are as good as any horses bred anywhere else. It may be more chic to sit on an Irish, German or New Zealand import, but remember that a horse doesn’t know where he’s from. Out And About, Molokai, Heyday, Nirvana II, Touch Of Class, Bally Cor, Gem Twist, Better And Better, Might Tango, Snowbound, and Good Mixture all won medals in the World Championships and the Olympic Games. Every one of them was an American Thoroughbred.

 

It may give some riders psychological satisfaction to be sitting on a horse that stepped off some foreign airplane, but that great horse can just as readily be foaled in your stable as in Shannon (Ireland), Amsterdam (Holland) or Warendorf (Germany).

 

You have a foal. Now what? That all depends upon the superiority of his genetic makeup, the skill with which he is trained, and good, old-fashioned American marketing, which is so often the missing link in American sport horse breeding.