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The Essential Few
Original article written by Autumn Blackmill posted 6 months 2 weeks agoWhen you think of your horses, who can you recall the best? It’s almost certainly those horses who have been monsters for you on the track, your first Graded Stakes winner, or that broodmare who has consistently produced top runners for your stable. The rest are, well, forgettable. Often I will peruse through my barns and find that I don’t remember these horses, let alone breeding and naming them, training them up, racing and even retiring them. They are the unknown fillers in my barn. Horses who I enter when I see they have not been entered, and mares who I breed when they have not been yet bred.
Naturally, it would seem easy to cull these horses whom I do not remember existing. Much like you could just throw out an old box in your attic and be none the wiser for what you have tossed. But unlike that box in your attic, when you go to the horses’ page to do the deed, well you start noticing things. Well this horse has a nice dam-line, sure it’s not extravagant, but the horse is surely better than the majority of what you can buy to replace it, right? And maybe this other horse has just been consistent. Nothing spectacular, but they have like five 3rd place finishes in a row in claiming ranks. That’s easy money and if they keep it up at least you know you’re boosting your OTB %. And so it goes, making excuses for all the horses you didn’t remember existing, until you’ve found that you haven’t tossed any at all!
This was my conundrum as I looked through my broodmare band. Having already tackled my racers (whose numbers are still dwindling as I find more that do not spark joy), I turned my attention to my mares. Then promptly closed that door and turned away to look at something not bursting at its seams. There were a lot. 162 at time of writing, with more on the way as I retire my older fillies and mares. How in the world was I going to tackle them all? Because unlike my racers, the broodmares tended to spark joy a little more often. Most have thrown an Allowance horse or two, so who knows, maybe that next stakes horse is just on the horizon! And having a barn full of babies to name and dote on is just the best, and these mares can help scratch that itch.
But while I hemmed and hawed about the best way to go about this task, I came across a quote. “If you didn’t already own this item, how much would you pay for it?”. It turns out, we tend to value the things we own much higher than the things we don’t. Yet once framed like this, it’s easier to see past all that and realize that, actually, we would not buy this item if offered to us. Now I had something to work with. Instead of the eternal debate on whether or not this or that mare would produce for me, it turned into a question of if I saw her on the sales page, would I buy her? And if I would, how much would I pay for her?
As you can imagine, shockingly few mares pass this test. So many are unknowns. From mares who never raced, to mares with mediocre pedigrees and no progeny to date. What would I pay for a formidable mare who falls into this category? Not much, if anything. So when I retire one of these into my breeding shed, is it really worth keeping her around? Sure I *might* hit the jackpot and get a stakes horse out of her, but is there anything in those bloodlines that says the horse will do anything once it is done racing and enters the shed? Wouldn’t it be better to trim those horses and focus more on the ones you would actually buy back, and at a high price? I would think so.
Then you have the mares that are just ok. They are the ones who occasionally produce Allowance horses, and maybe have some blacktype somewhere in the family. They’re nothing serious though, and deep down you can sense that the progeny earnings are just getting lower and lower with each generation out from that one stakes producer in the dam-line. How much would you pay for these? $5,000, if that? They litter the sales pages and clog up the Greener Pastures. They’re a dime a dozen, and for good reason. So if you would not snatch up such a mare for a higher price, then she’s probably painfully average and could be culled.
For me, the real focus is on the mares that I would get into bidding wars over. Or mares that I would snatch up in a heartbeat if I saw them on the sales page, as I did earlier this season in full-blown panic when I spotted a mare I desperately wanted for just over 100k. The mares that trigger these reactions are worth your time. There’s just something special about them, whether it’s in the pedigree or in their produce records. It might even be a strong hunch that you have that this one, well, she is the one. And in the end, I think having a barn full of broodmares you love and would fight for is better than one stuffed with mares who are completely forgettable.