Everything we say and do in this world is subject to the jury of public opinion.
It is hard not to be, given how we present ourselves to the world through social media outlets of the modern day.
The trouble begins when we don’t have the entire story panned out for us in a readily digestible format, we sometimes loathe or romanticize things that do not deserve either.
For horses this often means, “oh my horse has ancestor X; I love my horse, therefore ancestor X must have been great,” and we find a photo in an archive someplace or a long lost show record that validates our opinion. The problem is we then make our opinion out, publically, to the world, as if it is FACT. It is OK to like ancestor X, and if you want to seek out someone to breed to who is also related to ancestor X in order to keep that bloodline in your own herd, by all means help yourself have fun.
In our eagerness to make what we like seem more valid to our peers, we state things that are opinion as if they are fact, and then peers often accept it as fact and not as opinion, especially if they do not necessarily have as much insight as another in the topic – which creates a fallacy on multiple levels.
Say for example ancestor X looks just like your horse, and you look him up and find that ancestor X also won a world championship title in the discipline of your choosing. This would validate your feelings that ancestor X is a superior choice, full stop. What if though ancestor X was the only entry in the class? What if ancestor X, in fact. went to no other horse shows and was actually not a great example for the discipline but just got very lucky?
But we often don’t do that extra digging to see the entire picture from all sides, because our opinion has been validated by social media, and therefore we see it as truth.
This happens a lot in horse breeding.
Let’s think about a different example – let’s call this one horse Y. Horse Yis a beautiful specimen. He is well conformed, he has type for his breed, he is a desirable size and a desirable color, and he competes at a level that implies a certain mastery of his skill. Suppose horse Y retires and becomes a breeding stallion, because with his beautiful show record an equally beautiful self he would be a desirable father for one’s herd. Suppose horse Y has 100 viable offspring from a number of different owners and out of a number of differently blooded mares. Even with this level of research not being the deepest one could dig, one could assume this is a desirable and popular and successful stud.
Suppose horse Y was doing all of the breeding starting about 40 years ago. If you were a desirable popular and successful stud, it would be a safe assumption that his bloodline would still be readily present in many horses in his discipline.
But what if there weren’t?
Then interest in ancestor X and interest in horse Y would cause the interested party to potentially make the same sort of claim: “people are shortsighted,” and/or, “people are stupid,” and/or, “people don’t know what they’re missing,” and/or “we’ve got to save is this rare/endangered/valuable/old/historic individual bloodline.”
I believe sometimes this is the right call. Sometimes ancestor X and horse Y proved to be more valuable than people initially had anticipated. I believe though that this is the exception, not the rule.
Ancestor X might have produced the horse the interested person currently has by some means or other and maybe the horse that person has is wonderful, but what else did ancestor X produce? Watch those horses’ produce, do they have show records? Or have they dead ended and not continue to breed on for reasons unknown?
Stallion Y might have produced 100 offspring, but how many of those offspring produced anything? Let’s say a successful breeding stallion who is desirable in the breed produces maybe 50% that continue to breed on – because we know not all horses are bred because the primary purpose of horses is to be a riding companion or what have you – but let’s say it’s maybe 50%. What if stallion Y only has 10% of his offspring who have ever produced a grandfoal? And what if of those grandfoals, only 10% produced any great-grandfoals? We can trace these blood patterns, and we can see where people have purposefully chosen not to continue to breed a certain line. Yes, I will say there’s got to be a couple cases where people have been shortsighted, but I believe it is much more frequently the case that an individuals bloodline dies out because the individual does not produce desirable offspring, no matter how much we want to believe that of course they should have created wonderful offspring, because one horse down the line is wonderful.
We forget so much that a lot of factors influence what makes a good horse. It’s not just one ancestor or one parent or one person, it is all of these things. The genetics, the random chance that happens with recombination of chromosomes, the personality of the mare raising the foal, the handling of the foal by the breeder and trainer and owner and on down the line.
The lesson here, I really hope, is, Rarity Does Not Equate Value.
Performance, Conformation, Type, Personality, Get, Success of Get, is where value is accrued.
The Modern Morgan 