Breeding

STEVE: When you’re considering breeding horses, you need to decide what it is that you’re going to breed for. If you’re breeding racehorses, you certainly look at pedigrees, conformation, performance records, things of this nature. If you’re going to breed performance horses you’d look obviously at the same things, but you have a little different – everybody has a different opinion on what is a good sire, what’s a good dam. Typically if you’re looking for producing offspring from your horses to perform in the area that they’re suited for, whether they are warmbloods for jumpers or hunters, quarter horses for stock horses, rein horses, roping horses, things of this nature.

You certainly have to find pedigrees that are suitable for what it that your horse performs or what it does. You’re certainly not going to take a warmblood and breed it to a quarter horse and get yourself a roping horse. That’s probably a bad idea. But if you find a good cutting horse, stock horse bred horse of certain pedigrees that basically is suitable, the sire has performed well and has a history of producing offspring, it’s obviously a good fit. And the way it is with the convenience of breeding nowadays, you can actually get semen, ship it, and have everything done by your veterinarian at your farm and you can raise your foal there yourself.

ALEX: It’s one of those things that takes some research to do. You don’t just want to go on to breed a horse and get it done tomorrow. Like Steve said, there is some research into what do you want to do. You have to cross certain horses to get that specific type of horse that you want. It takes some research to do it. It’s highly recommended to get some people to help you to make that decision.