Editor's Note: The Jockey Club has asked for public comment on their proposal to cap at 140 the number of mares a stallion can breed annually. In this ongoing series, we will publish the perspectives of breeders, stallion farms and others on the proposal.
It's kind of a Catch 22, but I would say that it's up to the stallion owners and the breeders. You have the choice of breeding to a stallion who breeds 200 horses, or you don't have to breed to them. I don't think The Jockey Club should limit people who own something as to what they can do with it. On the other side, it's probably not a bad thing for the horses in general and for the business, but I just don't think they should be telling people what to do.
It depends upon the stallion for us, too. I breed to Into Mischief a lot and he breeds a lot of horses, but there are other stallions we will look at and say, there's going to be so many of them at the sale, let's not do that, or let's breed to a different stallion. If we have a nice mare that goes really well with that particular stallion, we'll breed to him anyway but we do pay attention to that when we're making our breeding decisions. We definitely talk about, “oh there's going to be 30 of those in book 1,” and we shouldn't do that with that horse. But people should make their own business decisions.
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