Warmblood By Scot Tolman M
y daughter, Michaela, home on Christmas break and freshly burgeoning with all of the new-found
information a (gasp…sharp intake of breath) $50,000+/ year college education makes available to willing and able students…and those who have sensed they would be transferred to a nearby community college and forced to live at home if they didn’t take advantage of whatever information their pricey college has to offer, proffered an interesting tidbit to her pedantic and genetics-obsessed father:
“What do you think is the biggest factor affecting mate
selection among human beings?” Ooh. I loved this question.
My mind immediately started reeling through all of the possibilities. My answer: “Physical attractiveness.” “Nope. Proximity.” Ooh. I loved this answer!
Of course, after a brief analytical rumination of incubation, illumination, self- application, and verification of the human mating processes (my brain works fast when it comes to breeding scenarios; it didn’t take very long… and get your minds out of the gutter), I swiftly moved on to horses. In the not-so-distant past, proximity was absolutely the controlling factor in the development of almost every breed or studbook, and it still controls the Thoroughbred industry to a large extent, unless you’re one of those Thoroughbred breeders who can actually afford a $250,000 stud fee. Then, I guess, you can probably afford to ship your mare where ever you want to, but even this scenario is a fairly recent development in breeding. In Holland, the stallion owners used to load their
boys into the back of a wagon or truck, and then literally drive them from mare to mare. In Germany, the government established local stallion stations for the mare owners of each region; the stallions at a particular station were the only ones that bred the mares of that
region. In North America, think of the development of the Morgan or the Quarter Horse—the vast majority of breeders were only willing to travel so far to sate their mares’ hormonal demands and their own attempts at genetic matching. Now, with the advent of frozen semen and over-night delivery services for fresh-cooled, proximity is rarely a consideration. Of course, my brain couldn’t stop there, however. I began musing on the situation and thinking about all of the possibilities if we humans removed ourselves from the equation and just let the mares make the decisions. It’s not as if one of my mares is going to get on the phone and call Meghan at ISF:
“Hey, Meghan. This
is Bowendy. Yeah, Scot’s mare. Hey, could you send me a shipment of UB-40 for tomorrow? I’m really feeling the old squat and pee reflex kicking in and my loins are wicked sensitive. I think the timing will be good.”
Although Meghan just
might prefer to deal with the mares themselves instead of a gazillion, over-zealous, micro-managing, waited-
to-the-last-minute-to-call-and-are-now-begging mare owners (personal experience here; it’s one of the biggest reasons I don’t stand stallions anymore: have to deal with too many people like me!), even with specialized cell phones adapted for hoofs, the test-runs on this idea of mares making their own calls haven’t worked out. It seems that a hormonal mare can’t dial delicately enough, and no one has been able to make a cell phone strong enough…especially when Ms. “In Heat” gets a busy signal or an answering machine; these girls don’t take, “We’ll be with you in a minute. Please, hold!” well at all. My experience with mares in heat really supports the whole proximity concept. Hell, if fence posts could reproduce, we’d have generation after generation of successively less supple and more “post-legged” horses.
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