I agree with Heidi. After being involved in pedigree research for a few years, and visiting many stud farms, it finally occured to me at some point, that the value of mares is immeasurable. I would personally not breed my mares to a non-purebred stallion, as their chances to reproduce are so finite, and so valuable. With a stallion though, you could breed anything, and no opportunity is lost.
Now take a stallion like Fire An Ice. He's a pretty enough fellow, and his Sire line features some nice Crabbet horses. Some Raffles, some Silverdrift, Ferzon and so forth. If you were to cross that stallion with a good mare with say....some Silver Vanity, some Al Marah blood, maybe a little Indian Gold, or some Oran....why that would make the resulting foal 3/4 of a very similar breeding, and the 1/4 on the Stallions side could be considered an outcross. So The stallion's contribution in my mind, would be to fertilize the mare since we aren't gonna clone her, and hopefully part of his gene pool would not delete from her quality. I believe that is why breeders do a lot of linebreeding, to keep the traits found in similar horses. And that is how the strains occured originally, I believe, with the Bedouins, before DNA, and before all the other genetic stuff we look at. I think, that if you bred this stallion to a totally different mare, on
e with no lineage that says, "endurance", it would not be as likely that you would get such a foal.
So yes Sharon may have come across a really nice nice horse, and the mare has a huge part in that.
I also agree with another post that I read, that the mare owner who has a very small herd, and is planning to breed "a keeper" with limited funds, needs to do some serious, serious research, asking many knowledgeable people, before writing a check. (This research would also include finding out about the siblings, the aunts, uncles, cousins , grandsires, grand dams etc---so one doesn't get a huge surprise when they find out that daddy stallion had plastic surgery, and that they have been bilked .)
Beth
