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May 2008 • VOLUME 33 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Breeding and Consequences: The Quarter Horse Last month we began our new series Breeding and Consequences. A new series where we discuss how we have to be careful what we breed for. Because our riders and their success depend on what we breed. We empower riders when our breeding is successful, for breeding a healthy horse with good conformation and movement makes it easy to succeed. Unfortunately, on the flip side, while we can help riders be successful, the opposite is also true, that our failures in breeding doom the riders and the horses to failure too. This is more true today than ever before, with the added complication of horse clones. Just recently the first cloned mare, a Haflinger, gave birth. Meanwhile the first cloned stallion, an endurance Arabian, Pieraz-Cryozootech-Stallion, a clone of two-time World Champion endurance horse Pieraz, has sired his first foal, so there now exists a filly now a month old, by a cloned stallion. We now face even more demanding questions about whether we are truly aware of the consequences of our collective breeding actions. (The original Pieraz is an Arabian gelding. He was cloned so that his exact genes could be perpetuated. Pieraz-Cryozootech-Stallion was born in February 2005 at the Laboratorio di Tecnologie della Riproduzione-Consorzio per l'Incremento Zootecnico (LTR-CIZ), a research facility on the outskirts of Cremona, Italy.) It is important to realise and respect the fact that breeding is actually a community effort, since we depend on everyone’s breeding practices to keep our particular breed viable and healthy. That is, we cannot exclusively breed out of our own, but rely on other breeders to complement our own breeding and breeding sources. The choices that we are faced with and the decisions that we make are truly difficult, as too often when we breed for certain traits we cannot know of what the full consequences are going to be. Breeding and Consequences examines different trait and breed characteristics that are currently being bred for, and examines some of the consequences of our breeding practices. We already know that in the process of breeding we have changed the horse into something very different from what he once was. We need to consider the consequences of our actions when we breed any animal. Whereas Mother Nature built in her own fail-safes to ensure healthy and viable individuals based on hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, we are seeing problems that occur again and again, in many different species. This is true of many horse breeds from Quarterhorses to Warmbloods to Arabians, where we are literally building faults into our horses. Consequences that were not foreseen. Too often these kinds of problems happen because we are breeding for a trait that has little or nothing to do with physical activity. Without a testing ground, faults that are bred in are allowed to continue and become part and parcel of the breed - bred into one horse or many, and into all of their descendants. For this reason alone, some might argue that the halter class has done more to harm more breeds than it has helped. This is not taking into account what our breeding has done emotionally, mentally or intellectually to the animals that when we are breeding to look or move in a certain way.
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