So... Dom posted about her mare's pedigree (and the fascinating and terrifying adventures in inbreeding it contains), and it got me thinking about Dragon's.
I knew going in what I was doing, choosing the breeding I did. I had a choice of three stallions and maybe fifteen mares, including my own; theoretically I could have gone for an outside stallion, but that felt like coloring too far outside the lines of the agreement that was on the table. I wanted a full Sendera Draft, which meant I needed at least 60% draft - which knocked a few potential crosses off the list.
I particularly liked two of the stallions, who are related (same stallion is the sire of one and grandsire of the other); part of it was conformation and personality. Nothing wrong with the unrelated guy; he's black with a big fat blaze, and he has a very similar conformation to the other two boys (like - startlingly similar, looks like he's related even though he's not). I just didn't like the idea of him as a baby daddy as much as I liked the other two for some reason. One of the related boys has less draft % than the other and a roman nose, which my strongest feeling there was "as long as it doesn't get more roman, it's fine." (No banana nose, omg.) The other is a bit smaller in size and not as flashy. Both related boys have spots, which... I mean, I can take or leave the spots; give me two identically-built horses with the same personality, and I might choose the spotted one, if I like the pattern?
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| Dragon's daddy |
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| Dragon's uncle |
(I don't have a good photo of Bachelor #3 - the pictures I have are gawky three year old, which... he looks like a gawky teenager, lol.)
Picking either one of the spotted boys completely removed several mares from consideration because they were far too closely related. A few mares I discarded because they drive me nuts - too clingy, in one case, and the others just plain rub me the wrong way, personality-wise. Eventually, what it came down to for me was it would be silly to not choose the best broodmare on site (or, as it turned out, her daughter) as the mother when she was on offer as an option. I get along with her just fine, I like how she's built, and I know exactly what she produces because I've seen 3 of her foals and one grandkid grow up. And that left one of the spotted stallions completely off because he's the best broodmare's son and the daughter's full brother.
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| Best broodmare |
The decision was made to breed both mother and daughter to the same stallion, and I'd get to pick which one I wanted. Best broodmare twinned twice and then turned up with an infection, so... it was gonna be daughter's baby or wait for the next year for momma's baby.
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| Dragon's momma |
And daughter's baby was awesome. :) We ended up here:
Colored-in boxes are duplicate horses. The stuff I drew boxes around
- the red boxes are Percherons, the blue Hackney. There's more
Percheron off the 5-generation pedigree on the other lines, along with a
bunch of Appaloosa (no shock - spots gotta come from somewhere) and
Quarter Horse, and also some Thoroughbred. (And I'm just enough of a
nerd to be delighted that Man O' War is in there, even if I have to go
back 10 generations to find him.) The mixed breeding was something I expected - the breed is relatively young, as such things go, and outbreeding is a regular thing to keep the breeding population viable.
I... had kind of forgotten until I looked at this again that the sire's dam was the product of what was, at the time, the only remaining "viable" breeding pair in the breed... which at that point the breed had 12 members, and at least three of them were the children of this cross. Or rather, it was less that I'd forgotten and more that I hadn't realized quite how those two were related.
At least it's not closer?
Side note: Cessa's sire is Dragon's great-grandsire on her dam's side. I chose to exclude Cessa from consideration for breeding to the related boys because one of them was straight-up her nephew and it felt icky, and the other, the guy that ended up siring Dragon... I dunno, it would have been OK, but much as I like Cessa, getting a foal out of her wasn't a high priority. It would be neat, for various reasons that are about half sentiment, but she stamps her foals with her head and her personality pretty hard, and I just wasn't convinced that he could tone down the personality. (Love her to death, but hoo boy, her babies have Attitude. Which I've been told she did too, when she was younger, and a lot of work went into making her the mostly model citizen she is now.)
I've been doing a lot of digging around past the generations shown here, just because I'm curious, and I have 100% fallen down a "history of the Thoroughbred breed" hole at this point. I haven't even started in on the other lines - I just picked up with one of the Quarter Horses and all of a sudden I was in TB-land and discovering that there are so many other "Arabians" and "Barbs" and "Turks" around the same time as the Godolphin and Darley and Byerley that I had no idea existed.
