Letter to the Editor: John Brown, DVM

I thought the two articles by Mike Cline and Elliott Walden were excellent and spelled out the problems of large stallion books extremely well. Both gentlemen are highly knowledgeable, long time participants in the Thoroughbred breeding industry and represent top class farms.

I hope that their opinions are taken seriously by the majority. Several factors were raised in the articles which have not been mentioned previously:

1) The physical and mental health of the stallion being forced to breed too many mares at one time.

2) Our duty as horsemen and horsewomen to rectify this situation.

3) The greed of some farms to obtain more and more control of the breeding industry.

One simple policy which could be instituted and, I believe would have some bearing on increasing the demand for a larger group of stallions rather than a few, is to change the way stallion stats are documented.

Instead of publishing the total earnings, total number of stake winners etc., rate stallions as to percentage of winners, percentage of stakes winners, average earnings of starters etc.

This would shift the emphasis to stallions who do not breed as many mares but who actually have better stats than those breeding huge numbers.

 

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