Lame or acceptable?

[Goldenstar]

Conformation and character are really important .

 

[CanteringCarrot]

I would rather buy a foal from a mare that had an injury and a working career than a young mare that has no proven record of soundness under the stress of work.

A mare with say some bone spavin after a decade of work is a very different thing to a six year old mare with the same issue .

I think a lot of people would agree with that. It's all relative. If a mare had a very successful career and is now showing some arthritic changes in her late teens, I'm not so offended. There's a few other things that I'd be ok with too. This goes for both stallions and mares because we need to look at both.

Horses aren't perfect creatures, it's just that when a mare gets injured, doesn't hold up, or is otherwise unsound, some just immediately toss them into the broodmare pool, and that's not right, IMO.

Sure, there are Thoroughbred broodmares that weren't hugely successful and aren't textbook sound that have produced winners, but that's kind of a shaky example. That industry creates a huge amount of waste and is fueled by a lot of money. As long as they somehow get a winner at the end or there's the prospect of a winner to chase after, they'll breed. There are so many ex-racers out there that weren't successful at racing and some aren't even successful in their home after they come off the track. It's waste or a byproduct of the industry. Not that some aren't fine riding horses, but some really aren't, and at the end of the day didn't live up to what they were truly bred for.

When it comes to unproven mares, my most recent horses (this one and last) were out of unproven mares. That's just how a lot of breeding is done within the PRE realm. I have mixed feelings about that and there are all sorts of faults across the breed. They've been doing that for ages. While bloodlines are analyzed, longevity isn't in most cases. How could it be when the mare is only used for breeding. Who knows how she'd hold up to a ridden career in dressage. For this reason and others, I won't own another PRE unless under very certain circumstances, and I love the breed. It's all about the stallions with them, and the PRE world is honestly bizarre. Just being at SICAB and seeing what won or what was desirable in morphology classes was eye opening. Horses with great dispositions, for the most part, but a lot of WTF in there too from a functional perspective.