Warmblood By Scot Tolman T
hose of you who have websites for
your farms will know where I’m going with the following quotation: “Hello, my name is
Wilhelmina Zachaussen. I am a 12-year-old girl from Sweden. You have beautiful horses. May I use your photos in my virtual stable?” A number of years
ago, when we first had our website, I would answer each of these emails and politely decline, thanking the pre-pubescent European children for their appreciation of my horses and my website. Now, the answer goes more like this: “Dear Wilhelmina, No. You do not have permission to use our photos, and, if you do and I find out about it, I will design a nasty web virus that gives all of your virtual horses virtual strangles.” Harsh? Maybe. Do I have the technological savvy to make good on my threat? Unfortunately, no. On to my point. As with all things reactionary and unkind, I’m finding my responses somewhat ironic these days. You see, I’ve decided to collect virtual stallions. Yes, if you must, it is fair to equate me with a middle-school-aged girl. Due to my love of the Twilight series and Channing Tatum movies, my son, Keagan, already tells me that I have the mind of a 13-year-old girl trapped in the body of a 51-year-old man. Face it. How many of us can afford to own and
promote, let alone purchase, a top quality, approved Warmblood stallion—one to whom we’d want to breed repeatedly? And, if somehow we can afford him, can we afford the equally-as-good-or-better stallion we need to breed to our original stallion’s daughters? So, Totilas is now mine, as are UB-40, Furstenball and Lyjanero. My virtual stable is my desktop. I’ve yet to create a grid resembling an aisle and stalls in which to organize/keep my horses, but the boys are always just a click away. In the bigger picture, for me, this is about planning.
As a little kid, while my brother and male cousins staged Hot Wheels car accidents and pedaled mini tractors around the yard, I situated myself under the giant
82 November/December 2011
Locus tree in my grandmother’s yard with the front page of yesterday’s paper and created the floor plan of a barn and paddocks for my plastic horses. Even then, there was always a stallion, and I was always changing the imaginary matings—the blue foal now goes with the Palomino mare,
and the red foal is with the
bay mare. (These mares had names… and what’s scary is that I remember
them.) Yes, I am living proof that at least some
people are born breeders. People often ask me why there are so few really top stallions in North America. I’ve always answered with a barrage of reasons: we don’t have enough mares to support the top stallions; campaigning a stallion in North America is much more difficult and expensive than campaigning in Europe; we have fewer stallion stations and we have to rely on transported semen, so managing the breeding is more difficult; etc. Maybe, inadvertently, I’ve found a better answer for
people: “We do have great stallions in North America. Just look at my desktop!” We don’t need more stallions in North America. We
don’t even need access to more stallions. What we need is thoughtful planning. Here’s some homework for every breeder out there: Who are your virtual stallions? Instead of letting hormonally-challenged, pre-adolescent girls have all the fun, fill your own virtual barn with the boys you want to use in shaping your breeding program. In the end, we’re bound to have a lot more fun than the pre- teens because our virtual fantasizing may actually put a live top foal in our very real barns.
WT 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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