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FADS AND FANCIES OF BREEDING CASE OF THE FAMOUS BROOD MARE MARION A REFUTA TION OF THE SATURATION THEORY THROW ¬ ING BACK TO ANCESTORS FOR VARIATION IN COLOR By SAL VAT O R RI I had recently a somewhat amusing nml nt the same time to 1110 not uninstriietive experience A breeder i fritnil of mine the owner of i mare tliit liiid produced i number iif winners wrote me that lie liiid m interesting case to report His lirooil mare a liay in color lind just foaled to the cover of i bay stallion t illy that was a bright chestnut with four white feet and a strip in its face None of lier previous foals had been chestnuts anil her owner wrote me This foal which in color is undoubtedly a freak can only lie explained on the theory that it was marked before birth And this is the case The dam ran all last season and was also turned out for several weeks this spring before foaling with a chest ¬ nut mare with four white feet anil a strip The two marcs have become so attached to each other that they keep close together and do not like to be separated so when I take them up I stable them where they can visit back and forth I think the color of this foal is due to the close association of the dam with her chestnut companion and is proof that such things do occur I have heard this question argued and suppose yon are familiar with it itIn In reply I wrote to the breeder and told him that while his explanation doubtless seemed correct ft him as a matter of fict the color of the foal under discussion had another explanation That while the dam was bay and her previous foals had all been bays or browns her own dam with which I had per ¬ sonally been familiar in past years was a chestnut with four white feet and a strip and that the color scheme was only the reappearance of ancestral traits which had been temporarily dormant or as biologists technically term it recessive I added You were quite right in saying that the foal was marked before birth but it was done by Dame Nature in a natural way and not an unnatural way wayIn In recent years much time and experiment have been devoted to the transmission of color in animal and plants anil as is usual in such cases the investigators and students have SOUK of them pressed the discoveries and conclusions into the service of theories decidedly farfetched Iut at the same time much legitimate food for thought has been provided and explanations which account for previously puzzling problems of heredity Put of these things only advanced breeders who dabble in scientific or pseudo scientilic literature have any inkling The average man who raises race horses has no suspicion of them Also he is like most people interested in sport of any kind pretty sure to have a vein of superstition which leads him to place credence in all sorts of notions and ideas an inheritance from the folklore of his primitive ancestors portions of which have been handed down from one generation to the next from the remotest antiquity For instance the idea that foals can be marked in the way the breeder of tbr one iir question tlioliglit thai t lfcdltrtTnls rfn 11Ia Ta bVeTr bVeTrnTerra1mTTrty nTerra1mTTrty liorsenieii since before tin birth of Christ In the most ancient writers on the horse there are passages which indicate it while there are abundant ones which show hat it was also believed common in propagating the human species Another similar belief that lias descended in the same way is that which horsemen term saturation or in science is called telegony This has its origin in the idea that mares bred repeatedly to the same horse in time became saturated with his characters to such an extent that their foals ly other horses will resemble her first mate A further extension of this theory is the belief that a thoroughbred mart bred to a nonthoroughbrPd stallion particularly a decidedly coldblooded one is thereby infected and will throw inferior foals when subsequently mated with a thoroughbred sire Finally the satura ¬ tion theory is carried to such extremes that it is contended that persistent matings of the same sire and dam result in inferior produce even if the mare never has been bred to a nonthoroughbred horse In order to get the best results a mare should not be bred to the same sire more than once or twice before being stinted to another one if her foals by the lirst sire are superior she can later be returned again to him himAll All these theories are as I have said superstitions wholly and survivals of folklore Not tine of them has a leg to stand on when the coldly logical analysis of authentic experiment and observation is applied It is therefore not less than surprising to lind an authority so distinguished and so iniluen tial as Mr William Allison the Special Commissioner of the London Sportsman and author of The Iritish Thoroughbred Horse in which lie expanded and formulated for all time Prueo Lowes Figure System stoutly allirming his belief in saturation Mr Allison devotes a chapter to Saturation in his book in which he refers witheringly to inflated wiseacres who refuse to believe in it and veil goes to the length of stating telegony to be a matter of common knokledge in the breeding of dogs as well as horses However since the appearance of Mr Allisons book many experiments have been made with both horses and dogs in the attempt to substantiate this matter of common knowledge and every one of them has proved it to be not common knowledge but common superstition Simply that and nothing LORD FALMOUTHS SUCCESSFUL PRACTICE PRACTICEThe The average breeder of dogs is even a stronger believer in saturation and telegony than is the average breeder of horses and from time to time writes to the sporting journals to quote instances that have come under his personal observation and are proof positive lint nothing is much more uncertain than the purity of canine pedigrees in view of the wellknown fact that surreptitious crosses are smug ¬ gled in from time to time of different breeds in order to introduce some point not native to the original one In consequence when a bitch that lias been bred let us say to a setter is next mated with a collie and in her litter there is a stray pup showing marks of setter blood the wise thing is not to jump to the conclusion that she was saturated at the first mating or infected either but that back some ¬ where in either her own ancestry or thnt of the dog with which she was mated there was a collie cross which after generations of recession is now just cropped up In his saturation argument Mr Alli ¬ son proclaims in capital letters that Frequent Mating with Same Sire Is Prejudicial and in support thereof cites the inevitable example of Lord Falmouth who attributed much of bis eminent success as a breeder to the fact that hi rotated his mares and never kept breeding one back persistently to one sire Put one swallow does not make a summer and Mr Allison was himself constrained to record that three mares and those famous ones were to some extent exceptions to the rule these being Princess of Wales Devotion and Cherry Duchess the lirst of which produced a succession of famous foals by Marsyas the second by Hermit and the last by Sterling Put even in their cases Mr Allison maintains that the early foals were better than the late ones so in the final analysis they prove both saturation and the deterioration that conies from it itIt It has been well said that Anything can be proved by the Stud Hook and there is considerable truth in that assertion Put at the saint time it is strange how many dogmatic assertions would never be made if their authors would study the Stud PooU a little more closely For a study of it an analytic one is the most convincing way by which a breeder can demonstrate the futility of saturation in so far as it produces either degeneration or telegony while at the same time it will give the coup tit grace to any belief in the notion that lirst foals are necessarily superior to subsequent ones from the same mating matingIn In the first place one cardinal principle may be stated which all breeding history tends to validate This is that great horses are seldom produced and that when they are their duplication cannot logically be expected At best a brood mare that has produced olie great performer should not be faulted for fail ¬ ing to produce another as great whether bred back or to another sire If she produces an average of high excellence that is all the most sanguine owner should anticipate There are few exceptions but they merely enforce the rule Look over the list of classic winners and see how few mares have ever produced two winners of the Derby or of the Derby and Oaks or Derby and St Leger and to their num ¬ ber adtl the names of those which have produced two winners of l0CflO or more or even 000 or more You can inscribe the entire roster on a small sheet of paper paperAs As Mr Allison has always paid more attention to American horses and turf affairs than do most Fnglish horsemen while the same was true of ISrnce Lowe whose prophet he became it has always seemed to me that bad lie studied our Stud 1ook for evidence he might have been more conservative in his statements Urnce Lowe for instance cited Marion by Malcolm as Americas greatest brood mare and one of the greatest in all the world And what Marion tloes to the saturation theory is in the ex ¬ pressive language of the street a pity and a shame shameFor For twelve consecutive seasons Marion was bred exclusively to one stallion Norfolk producing by him ten different living foals of which nine were distinguished performers and a half dozen stake win ¬ ners 15y far the two best of them were Emperor of Norfolk winner of twentyone out of twentynine races anil 72400 and El Rio Key which was never beaten winning seven straight races anil 4tS3i Now the Emperor was her seventh foal and El Rio Key her ninth Norfolk having died she was bred to Joe Hooker in 1SSS and produced by him the famous mare Vo Tambien winner of fortyfour out of seventvthree races and K4SO and Yo Tambien was individually an entirely different type from Mar ¬ ions former foals and bore no resemblance to Norfolk their sire sireSubsequent Subsequent to Yo Tambien Marion produced two other foals by Joe Hooker of which one Key del Reyes was a stake winner but neither of them approached her first Joe Hooker foal Yo Tambien in excellence This might be cited as proof that subsequent foals are inferior to lirst ones from the same mating hilt there is an entirely natural and nontheoretic explanation for the fact When Marion pro ¬ duced her last two foals she was an old mare and her vitality and reproductive powers had begun to fail after her long series of maternal achievements achievementsDIFFICULTIES DIFFICULTIES IN WAY OF AMERICAN BREEDERS BREEDERSOf Of course in the case of Marion neither does one swallow make a summer but a large number of onlv less notable cases can be cited from the pages of Urnce There is one possible explanation of the fact that American breeders seem to have practiced the policy of returning the same mare to the same stallion much more largely than Kritish ones Tills is that the locations of sires have been much more of a determining force In England a breeder can send a mare to any stallion he chooses at small trouble and for shipment expense because all the good ones are situated within a small territory whereas the reverse was the case in America in former years at least ami still in some measure obtains Barring the concentration of sires in Kentucky they were scattered all over the United States and changing a mare from one fashionable sire to another from season to season involved risks and expenses heavy and often unwise In consequence the said matron was without doubt often bred back when her owner confreres would hare mated her otherwise otherwiseThe had he been situated as were his English The number of flrst foals which have achieved renown is large hut it proves nothing be ¬ cause an equally imposing list can be constructed of nonfirst foals Theie is also always this to remem Oontlaued OB lecond pace FADS AND FANCIES OF BREEDING Continued from first page her that it Is physically impossible to repeat a mating exactly Stallions and mares change in condition from year to year as they grow older and are not the same that formerly they were Some stallions merely as stallions get better foals at a certain period in their lives than either before or after The samo thing is true of some mares Those which begin at the top as it were and consistently remain there are rare birds the greatest of the great sires like St Simon and dams like Marion whose names in breeding history are like myto apples of gold in pictures of silver The general run tof sires strut their brief hour jike St Itlaise for instance and then recede into the background The aver age brood mare I speak only of the successful one produces one comet of a season an additional shooting star or two and a milky way of also rans ransAs As we grow older and the years the decades and the generations of turf and breeding experience pile up behind us it is ditlicult for those of us who refuse to nurse illusions or deceive ourselves with snap judgments to resist the tendency to become somewhat pessimistic regarding breeding theories and superstitious The amount of undiscovered country of lands that are not down on any chart in the breeding terrain bailie the most intricate ligurings of the explorers To keep on somtwhat Poloniusliko it is a mighty maze but not without a plan The plan is good as far as it goes and underlying it without question there are occult laws and secret processes which if we could unveil the ultimate secrets Of nature would supply keys to all enigmas Itut as that situation is one never likely to eventuate the best we can do is keep on along lines of least resistance and trust otherwise to luck luckLines Lines of least resistance to the rational 111111 include those from which superstition and prejudice have been eliminated or at least as nearly so as is humanly possible And in the name of progress it is somewhat discouraging to lind an eminent authority whose opinions are internationally deferred to and whose system or at least that whose high priest he is receives so much exploitation clinging to equivocal ideas like saturation and telegoiiy or proclaiming tho superexcellence of lirst foals ex ¬ cept as speculative merely merelyAmerica America has thus far won only one Epsom Derby that is with an Americanbred colt never have done so had Mr AlliMins ideas obsessed the minds of breeders in the seventies as they do today Maggie It It daughter of Australian and Madeline by Fost m produced seven foals in eight years all by Leamington and Iroquois the Derby winner was the sixth and next to last of the Hock HockIt It would seem curious were it not so human when we stop to consider how the breeding of race horses has pursued as it were a double course on the one hand attended by an incredible amount of in ¬ telligent study and experiment and on the other by an equally incredible amount of the sheerest prej ¬ udice and superstition and hopelessly antiquated and exploded ideas and methods And how often the two are found combined in the same breeder It would In amazing were it not so usual As it is we can only marvel at the capacity of the genus homo to believe in mathematics and fairy tales at the same time timeItut Itut again who would want breeding to become an exact science with everything reduced to a set of formulas as invariable in their production of results as those of a chemist All the fun and fascination would then be gone and nothing left wherewith to lend allure to our endeavors to produce a Futurity winner Differences of opinion make horse racing They also make horse breeding and it is because we have many men of many minds That we have may racers of many kinds Let us be glad that this
