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Re: [RC] Still on breeeding ............ - heidiOK, again in your collective opinion, what would be the sliding scale of acceptable faults in a breeding specimen - both mare and stallion? We're talking here for endurance and / or general riding, not the show ring or other cosmetic reasons. It isn't a matter of "acceptable" vs "unacceptable" as much as it is a matter of degree. For instance, define a "long" back. Very few horses meet the biomechanically desireable three-circle horse. By definition, most have "long" backs. But if the back is only a little bit long, and the body is deep and the loins are strong, one can still function with it. As a breeder, one would still try to breed away from it--but I'd rather breed two horses with backs "a little bit" long than one with a REAAALLLLY long back and one with a "perfect" back. That said, I look at bodies and balance first and foremost. Those are the core of the athlete. I steer away from long, shallow bodies, weak loins, and horses that have shoulder and hip mismatched. Unfortunately, breeding horses is not something you can do by a "recipe" or by any sort of numerical formula. You can assign numbers to faults and come up with something that looks logical on paper, but it will invariably give you a "committee-built" in reality. Also, I know genetics and breeding in general is a crap shoot, If you do it "in general" then yes, it becomes a crapshoot. And this is what too many people do--they have a "general" pedigree with no consistency to it, and then they come away saying that the pedigree has no prognostic value. Well, indeed, if you have a pedigree that contains everything genetically but the kitchen sink, and you breed that horse to one with a similar pedigree, the "set of possibilities" includes everything but the kitchen sink--you have "predicted" offspring all over the map, and that is indeed what you get. But if you have a pedigree full of fairly consistent horses, you have limited your range of possibilities to the genes carried by those consistent horses, and what you get will fall within that range. You can't get anything out of a mating that isn't in the combined pedigrees. The genes of the offspring aren't just plucked out of thin air. If you are surprised by what you get, it just tells you that you didn't really know what is in there in the first place. Heidi ============================================================ Riding alone is when you teach a horse all the "tools" and "cues" he needs to handle the trail, to hold a speed, deal with hills, etc. It's also where you develop the "bond" that causes him to "defer" to you before losing his cool. ~ Jim Holland ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/ ============================================================
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