Warmblood H
By Scot Tolman
appy New Year to you and yours! May good health and good horses bring you much joy
in the coming year, and may you be more successful
than I at keeping your New Year’s resolutions. Honestly, I don’t normally make them. I have enough issues with self-loathing without breaking another diet, feeling guilty about skipping the gym or admitting that red wine doesn’t already come in serving-size bottles. This being said, I’ve already broken the one resolution I made for 2013. What makes my transgression worse is that the deadline for this column has me writing about my lack of willpower at the end of November. Yes, before the New Year has even begun, I’ve broken my one New Year’s resolution. Resolution: No frozen semen purchases or frozen semen breedings in 2013. Broken: On November 26, I took advantage of Hilltop Farm’s Cyber Monday special and booked Orchis, our top mare, to Everdale, the young Lord Leatherdale x Negro son that just won the KWPN spring testing. “Technically,” since I made the purchase in 2012, I haven’t actually broken my resolution yet, but given that I have every intention of using the above-mentioned cryogenically-preserved genetic material this spring, my resolution is virtually doomed before it begins. Does this make me an addict? Is there a 12-step program for frozen semen junkies? Honestly, you’d think I’d learn my lesson. In the 30
seconds that I just paused to calculate the amount of money we’ve spent on frozen semen that might as well have been flushed down the toilet, the number reached five-digit proportions—and I’m not talking about the two digits after the decimal point here. Give me more time, say, a couple of minutes, and I’ll probably be either suicidal or divorced. In most aspects of my life, I am a rational human being with no compunction to gamble other than buying an occasional Powerball ticket. Show me a video of a newly approved stallion or allow me more than a quick perusal of the annual stallion issue of any major sport horse magazine, however, and Carol has to physically wrestle the phone out of my hand or throw my laptop off the
deck...anything to intervene in my descent into bankruptcy from buying WAY more frozen that I can possibly use or, worse, will ever even result in a viable pregnancy.
106 January/February 2013 My friend Faith Fessenden breeds one mare a year,
at most. Let me repeat that. One mare. I personally witnessed her bidding on four different stallions at the KWPN-NA silent auction one year, and she won two of them. To make matters worse, she already had, and still has, a total of about 50 doses of eight or ten different stallions carefully/obsessively stored in her liquid nitrogen tank, tucked safely in the corner of her tack room. 50- plus
doses...for one mare. When I asked her which stallion she used this year, she didn’t even hesitate to give me the name of yet a different frozen semen stallion than any of the ones she already had purchased and in
storage. I’m not sure she could/would have been so forthcoming with just anyone, but having a conversation with me about frozen semen is like
going to an AA meeting for an alcoholic—there is safety in the company of those with the same addiction. We’re sick. Very sick. It’s a certifiable disease. We need help. Faith’s husband asked her if it’s worth continuing to
drive over two hours, round trip, every couple of months to get her tank recharged. Faith says, “If you have to ask, you don’t understand.” Well I understand, and I say, even a woman as well
respected and intelligent as Faith lives in denial. It’s time for someone to play the martyr here and “come out,” as it were: “Hello. My name is Scot, and I’m a compulsive buyer
and hoarder of horse semen. My drug of choice is dressage stallions, but I have been known to get a quick fix from the occasional jumper.” Whew. I feel better already. Come on, I know I’m not alone in this. Put down your ninth cup of coffee, stub out your cigarette, stand up from that god-awful, uncomfortable folding chair and speak. You’ll feel better. Let the healing process begin.
Scot Tolman has been breeding
Dutch Warmbloods for over 20 years at Shooting Star Farm in Southwestern New Hampshire. Read more of Scot’s writing at
shootingstarfarm.com.
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