Warmblood A
By Michael Barisone Kissing Frogs
fter I wrote my column in the May/June issue about how Vera and I purchase foals in Holland every year (Vera is from Holland and her fam- ily is in the horse sales business, so this is a natural course of ac- tion for us), a reader responded with a letter to the editor asking how Americans might be more encouraged to purchase young horses domestically. One of the simple facts of horse shopping in Europe is that you can see a lot of horses in a short amount of time, simply because of geography. Since there is a high concentration of horse breeders in a relatively limited area, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Young horses are available at a reasonable price, and at an auction you might see 60 or 80 foals you would consider bringing home. I wish I could shop like that here, but I can’t. There are certainly exceptions to the generally lower prices there: I just paid a lot for a young horse at the auction in Holland, but I’ve never seen anything like him before so it was worth paying a premium. But it’s not where the horse is bred that matters. If the bloodlines are the same, who cares where they come from? Almost all Warmbloods here and in Europe are from the same or similar bloodlines. For me, it’s about the convenience and the number of horses available. How many Warmblood foals are we producing here com- pared to Holland and Germany? I can’t tell you the statis- tics but I’m sure it’s vastly different. You can go to Europe for a few days and see 300 horses. Here you can spend three days and see five horses. I know nothing about breeding; it’s not my game.
I’m a rider and a trainer. I want a horse I can ride and it doesn’t matter where that horse comes from. I want to take a quality prospect and make him into a top horse. The reality is, where breeding is concerned, unfortunate- ly it’s probably going to take us as a country another 50 years to be able to be competitive with the Europeans. They’ve just been at it so much longer than we have. As a result, there are ten times as many top-quality horses there. The Europeans have a culture of develop-
ing their horses within a system and a structure that we lack. We’re trying, but generally in Europe the rider is under the tutelage of a really good rider, who’s un- der the tutelage of an even better rider, who’s under the tutelage of an Olympian. All the segments work together. That’s the system that we have to create in this country. To be successful, you need a good horse. Again, it doesn’t mat- ter where he came from. You need to look at his temperament, his conformation and his bloodlines in order to assess his quality and,
once you find him, you need to get him (or her) into a good program early. To prove that a horse’s origin is irrelevant, one of the best horses I’ve ever owned was found by my mother, who was driving through rural Ontario, Canada and hap- pened to notice a horse trotting through a field. He was some oddball thing, I tell you: a Saddlebred/Cleveland Bay/Thoroughbred cross, with his mane down to here. She drove in and asked the farmer if he’d sell the horse. She paid $2,500 for him, brought him home and he turned out to be a freak of nature. I rode him until he was five years old and he scored a 90 percent at First Level. (I sold him in order to finance a new indoor.) This horse out of a barbed wire-fenced field was quite a find. The “gems” are out there, but you have to be willing to search for them. I don’t comparison shop. If I like it, I’ll buy it. Also, I
don’t buy trained horses. I study the type, the gait, the bloodlines and if I like what I see—and he’s in my price range—I buy the horse. At the auction I attended, I knew Michigan B (the youngster I paid a lot for) was the best of the bunch. Now he may grow up to be a peg- legged donkey but at four months old, he was what I was looking for. You can drive yourself crazy comparing. When you’re looking at horses, be decisive. Having been through a whole lot of life with both horses and people, I’ve learned the absolute worst rea- son to choose a person for a relationship is chemistry. The worst. You have to have similar life goals. She can’t
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