Giddy Up

If Paint is a Quarter Horse with excessive white, what is a Quarter Horse? A Quarter Horse is a Thoroughbred outcross. A Thoroughbred is an Arabian outcross.

When the Foundation Registries started up, I was amazed to learn that Poco Bueno was a foundation sire. I thought that he was the great grandson of a foundation sire. Some of the leading Paint sires of our time are Quarter Horses. Painted Robin, Triples Titan are just two that come to mind. In today’s registry, they could be registered as Quarter Horses but not in the Regular Paint registry. Why? They do not have one registered Paint parent.

Appaloosa breeders have the same background. Bright Eyes Brother, Hall of Fame sire is by a Quarter Horse, Billy Maddon, out of a Quarter Horse mare, Plaudette, who produced a Quarter Horse Champion Running Mare, Maddon’s Bright Eyes. Plaudette was by a Thoroughbred, King Plaudit out of a Peter McCue mare.

When the Thoroughbred was first being developed, they were the products of three Arabian stallions. You could not have a Thoroughbred without being able to trace back to one or more of those three stallions. The three were the Byerly Turk, the Godolphin Barb and the Darley Arabian.

The Byerly Turk’s most prominent descendant was Herod. The horse, Matchem, was a grandson of the Barb and the Darley Arabian sired two great horses that went on to out produce themselves, Flying Childers and Barlett’s Childers.

Up to 1940, the Arabian Registry was part of the American Studbook maintained by the American Jockey Club in this country. Which brought up some interesting complexities in later years. Remember that a Thoroughbred produced some of the leading Quarter Horse stallions and mares. There was an Arabian stallion in Colorado who produced Arabians, Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds. He had an AHR number and a JC number and so his get were able to be registered in several registries depending on the mare’s breed.

The Saddlebred as we know it now did not exist a century ago. The history of the breed starts in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri. Much of the development was done in Kentucky and so they were known as ‘Kentucky saddle horses’. Most of the earliest registered horses had some Thoroughbred blood crossed on trotting and slow pacing mares.

They were able to walk, trot, canter and they also were capable of racking, doing a running walk or fox trotting or slow pace. I bet you thought that only Tennessee Walkers did that. Those saddle horses that did the running walk are the foundation of today’s Walking Horses.

One of the foundation sires for today’s Standardbred was a Thoroughbred named Messenger. While he did not produce any trotters himself, his son Mambrino produced Abdallah a noted sire of trotters in America. Another sire of trotters was the stallion, Justin Morgan. Justin Morgan is recognized as the founding sire of the Morgan Horse. In some circles, he was also thought to be descended from Thoroughbred breeding.

Today’s foundation breeders are for the most part trying to revert to the past when the horse was used for a variety of jobs. He pulled the plow or delivery wagon all week and on Sundays was the family buggy horse or was at the bush track running against other horses.

The breed registries are starting to realize that most of horses, people own in today’s world, do a multitude of tasks. They are used to work cattle, teach the kids how to ride, barrel race for Mom and rope for Dad and still look good enough to show at halter in the morning and do performance events in the afternoon.

In the market, these horses are still bringing decent prices as compared to the one-event horses where the demand has dropped dramatically. I monitor several sales across the nation and have watched what used to be really hot breeding, sired by leading sires, bring less than the stud fee. If you have training and upkeep added in, you really have a loss that the IRS is going to question at some time about your profit motive if you have one.

As one person put it, you need to get rid of ones that you are just feeding and buy one or two really good ones. If you are breeding because you have mares and a stallion and are selling the results for canner prices, you may want to change your program completely. From a business standpoint, and the IRS’s, that will make more sense than holding on to what you have and trying to make a profit. I have heard all the stories about how the public does not know a good horse when they see one but who else is going to buy the horse. That applies to those horses that are foundation breeding (?) as well as the ones that are not.

When something first gets hot, lots of us get lucky and do really well at first. Then the market becomes more educated and shifts to a more realistic view of things and everything shifts back to normal. At that time, if you have been watching and listening to the buying public, you will have upgraded your program and still be able to break even, in most cases.

I don’t have a problem with foundation breeding because at one time or another in my life with horses, I have bred, trained or sold horses that are considered foundation in today’s world. But as the market shifted, I had a choice, either to make a living or to find new employment.

If you are profit motivated, you will continually be looking for ways to improve your profit margins. If you are a hobbyist, you may not care at first but at some time you will want sell or trade your horse(s) for a different one. One always wants to recoup some of the investment that you have put in the horse and the only way to do that is to have something the public wants to buy.

M. R. Bain has been a horseman all his life and a professional trainer since 1955. He is an owner and breeder and has been employed as a breeding and stable manager. His intent on writing these articles is to educate horse people on how to operate a successful horse business. You may contact him at MRBAIN@msn.com with your questions and comments. Also, look for his upcoming book, The Business of Horses–Creating A Successful Horse Business

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