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Kat, you make some good points, but only up to a point. 

 

YES, it is the recent selection that makes a difference--but the point I've been TRYING to make is that those breeders who have not altered the type from those early horses are the ones who are successfully breeding endurance horses.

 

Furthermore, the number of generations between those pre-WWII horses and the present day makes a difference.  If those horses are up close in the pedigree, there has been less opportunity to alter the type.

 

Additionally, YES, there is a difference in the selection that has been done overseas in the "old" bloodlines, and that selection has greatly altered the results one gets today.  Two examples come to mind--one being the SE horses that were bred to be "living art"--that was done in Egypt, and brought here in modern importations.  BUT--if you look at those pedigrees, they also contain a great many individuals that people like the Blunts and the early breeders from other parts of Europe left behind.  The modern Polish breeding is another example--the Poles have bred for basically 2 markets since WWII, those being the show market and the racing market.  The Polish race horses have maintained some of the type of the pre-WWII cavalry style horse, and the show horses have not--for the very reasons you state.  But additionally, the Europeans (including the Poles and the Russians) have incorporated the same sorts of lines that have come here from Egypt that do NOT reflect the same ancestor pool that their pre-WWII horses did. 

 

So while your points are valid, you are not entirely correct in saying that the ancestor pool is the same.

 

Heidi

Since virtually all (other than the Egyptian imports of the 60s and 70s,
but RSI, a well respected breeder of horses that have succeed well in
endurance used many of those) of the horses that "people have altered
for 'aesthetic' purposes" also come from this same stock, the fact that
most endurance horses come from "old breeding" isn't very relevant.  All
of the current stuff coming out of Poland comes predominantly from
pre-WWII Polish as well, but for the past couple of generations their
breeding selection criteria have been for the "aesthetic purposes" of
the showring market so the fact that it, too, comes from old bloodlines
is irrelevant.

What matters is not what horses are in the back of your pedigree, there
were very few arabian breeding programs 50-100 years ago so everybody's
base stock came from some combination of these "old" programs.  What
matters is the selection criteria that have been used in RECENT
generations.

If your horse's close up pedigree is riddled with horses that have
succeeded in the modern (I would say mid-seventies to present) showring,
its chances of success are much lower than if you get one from a program
that eschewed the showring and bred horses for some athletic endeavor;
athough you may still get a "throwback" to its earlier generations
(which is why you could buy such horses in the killer pen, the showring
people were throwing away their "throwbacks").

In the modern showring stuff, you will still find CMK horses, pre-WWII
Polish and other old DB horses.  It will probably be a few more
generations back, since the show breeders breed, compete, and select
their breeding stock at a younger age (so their generations are fewer
years), but it is still there.

The horses in your purebred arabian's pedigree that were born before
1945 are virtually irrelevant.  Prior to 1945 pretty much ALL Arabian
breeders were making breeding decisions based on athletic capability.
What matters is what selection criteria have been used recently.  Here
in the US, there are a number of "preservationist" breeders of which the
CMK is one of the most prominent, that eschewed the modern showring
fairly early on, so you have a better chance of getting a good horse
from one of them.  However, none of this preservationist breeding was
done on a large enough scale for any particular names to totally
dominate.

And this is why the names in your horse's pedigree "don't matter."  What
matters more is the names of the breeders in your horse's pedigree.
Ideally you want your horse to come from a breeding program that has
been selecting for athleticism all along, and as long as you do this,
the actual individual horses in the pedigree don't make all that much
difference.  What you want to look at is not the names in the pedigree,
but the selection criteria the breeders of those horses used....and you
want to look at the ones that are up close, not those that are 50 years
and five generations back.

If you look in the pedigree of *Padrons Psyche, today's modern halter
showring poster child, you will find Kann and Korej, Arax, Ofir (the
sire of Witez II), Naseem all over it.  It is almost all pre-WWII Polish
and early Russian (although there isn't any Crabbet).  And if you look
at Huckleberry Bey (another modern showring poster child), you will find
scads of early American imports and lots of Crabbet and a whole bunch of
the assoreted Pre-WWII polish horses that have been named here.

The question is not what original bloodstock were people using, since
their purebred arabians, by definition everybody is using the same
original bloodstock.  The question is what were the selection criteria
for the horses that are only 2 generations back.  Your chances are
better if those selection criteria were for some strenuous athletic
purpose that required consistency and longevity.  The names in the
pedigree don't matter, because most of them will be unrecognizable,
since people who were making these breeding decisions were NOT doing it
on a large scale and they had no place to show off their horses and gain
name recognition.

There are a few recognizable names, and you would do well to go with
these (assuming that the horse you are getting is not a crop-out from
that breeder), but this doesn't mean that you should discount others
because the names aren't recognizable.  There are many horses with
unrecognizable names whose parents have been selected for their athletic
ability that make fine bloodstock.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



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