I part-own a one-win Chinese Dragon mare named Oriental Bronze and have recently been struggling with a problem which many of you will be familiar with. Do I put her back into work? Do I breed from her? Do I move her on?
As I always advise my students, I thought I’d better start by doing my homework. To my surprise I discovered that Chinese Dragon has a 50% winners to starters ratio. As he’s only had one SW, he’s certainly not a good stallion but I’d thought that he was entirely useless. I’d also thought that he’d ended up somewhere like New Caledonia or Thailand, but no, he’s in Oz and standing at $3300.
The information about where he was standing comes from the article referenced below, which is quite fascinating from at least two points of view. Firstly, the Lucky Country has a huge range of stallions standing at very reasonable fees. Here in New Zealand we breeders have a very restricted choice. There are sound economic reasons for this but the fact remains that if we own a mare which lacks commercial appeal, just what do we do? Over-mating her in terms of service fee is just plain daft; we are often left with the choice of going to stallion X or leaving her in the paddock or getting rid of her. Whilst Option C is no doubt the most fiscally sensible solution, there’s always that nagging thought that just maybe she could leave a Bonecrusher or a Grey Way or an All In Fun…
The second thought produced by the article was how crucial opportunity is in a stallion’s career. Whilst Chinese Dragon was lucky enough to end up at Fairdale, he doesn’t seem to have been overly-well patronised by outside breeders with an avalanche of top-class mares. It’s true that assessing opportunity is quite a challenge because we’ve got to factor in the question of genetic suitability of mares for a particular stallion, not just how much black type they have close up in their pedigrees. If you’d like some proof of this, the enduring success of White Robe Lodge is a case in point.
Anyway, here’s the article.
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