Re: OKAY, HORSE BREEDERS, HERE'S YOUR NEWEST TECH CHALLENGE!

[CMKSAGEHIL@aol.com]

First of all, there isn't enough money in breeding endurance horses to utilize
technology like this.

Secondly, many serious endurance breeders are also preservationist breeders,
and we need both geldings to market (and to test our programs to see that we
are truly preserving the sorts of horses we want to preserve) and fillies to
carry on the lines.  The really special colts get to be stallions.  There is
no guarantee that selecting for a Y chromosome will give you the other
qualities you want in a male, since those only happen in about one in twenty
colts.  So what's the point?

Thirdly, I strongly disagree that this technology will lessen the slaughter
market, for two reasons.  First, one group of big contributors to the
slaughter market are the backyard breeders who are clueless what they are
doing; they will not use the technology so it will have no effect on what they
produce.  Second, a lot of overproduction (hence source of slaughter horses)
comes from the get-rich-quick sort of breeder.  These likely WILL use the
technology and will glut the market with what they think is the hot gender,
which makes the market worse and actually ADDS to the slaughter horse burden.
Saw it happen with AI, and just about every other such advance--great tools in
the right hands, but also a tremendous potenial for misuse.  Am seeing the
same thing with shipped semen, where folks will breed to the fad, and the
breed suffers; whereas in the hands of those who understand how to do it, more
compatable mates are selected and the breed gains.  Alas, the latter sort of
breeder seems to be in the minority.

Heidi Smith, DVM--Sagehill Arabians (Oregon)