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BREEDING THEORIES AND FORMULAS ICONOCLASTIC VIEWS REGARDING TEE FH ACY Ol TAP ROOT DESCENT AND OTfffR ISMS OF THE DAY By SALVATOR SALVATORRecently Recently I contributed some comments captioned Fads and Fancies in Breeding to Daily Racing Form and in them I took occasion to remark that to mis it was a source of pleasure tliut the breeding of winners had not been reduced to an exact science in which everything proceeded after a set of formulas infallible in their results and that instead different breeders worked along different lines following different ideas and theories or beliefs thereby producing many different kinds of horses All of which added fascination to the great sport and incalculably increased its allurements allurementsThese These observations I note have attracted the attention of the erudite and earnest Exile whose disquisitions upon breeding I Jiuve long followed with interest but alas they have failed to elicit his approval lie is not at all enthusiastic over my point of view and rather deplores the utterance of such heresies Exile is all for the formula and the recipe and inclines to wish that the mixing of blood strains might be dona in the same way in which chemists mingle their various ingredients so much of this so much of that a few drops of the either Then shake the bpttle and presto Behold your Derby winner or stake horse horseExile Exile I take it believes in sandwiching the imperishable blood of Herod Matchcm and Eclipse baek and forth and in and put until the breeder produces a pedigree if nothing else something like that lamented decoction formerly freely imbibed by connoisseurs wherever conviviality abounded known as poussecafo The different layers of liquids cunningly poured in upon each other by a master hand produced within their crystal receptacle something as dazzlingly colorful as a rainbow and the effect when taken inwardly was most exhilarating A great many people absorb what I may call rainbow pedigrees poussecafe of pur sang in much the same style They lick em up with incomparable gusto and the immediate effect approaches the intoxicating But when it wears off sad to relate what a darkbrown taste then remains in the mouth Especially in the cold gray dawn of some morning after a Derby I do not wish to make these inconsequential remarks too pointed Hut at the same time I cannot refrain from recalling that Exile depicted fflr s rainbow hues the incqjuparable pedigree of a certain highmettled steed in advance of the late Kentucky Derby Hut harrowing to relate this poussecafe racer finished far back in the ruck though Jie went to the post it was announced fit to race for his life and carrying if rumor be correct and probably it was in this ease an enormous amount of money moneyHut Hut let us not linger on such painful things I feel sure that Exile knows more about blood lines in a minute that I do in a week and as I have said I never fail to read his disquisitions Avith atten ¬ tion In some ways they remind me of those of a writer of former days also an Englishman who long adorned the Vgallery of our snorting journalists I refer to the late Charfes J Foster whose pen name was Privateer it must be all of a quarter century if not more since he passed but previous to that time he had for an extended period been connected as contributor or editor with the Spirit of the Times the New York Sportsman and other journals Perhaps few people today remember him and they only the veterans Yet he was one of the most brilliant writers upon racing that ever flour ¬ ished on cither side of the pond There was a literary finish and an clan about what he wrote that made it invariably interesting and often fascinating and in my youthful days I used to hang over his writings and wish they might never end Now Irivateer had many little hobbies of his own which he used ably to exploit And the principal one as 1 recall it was that one which now so agreeably occupies the peri periof of Exile I refer to the imperishable and incomparable merits of Herod Matchcm and Eclipse those three shining morning stars which appear nowadays in Exiles tabulations as initials only but to whose full names and rank he pays such devoted reverence TBIVATEER AND EXILE KINDBED SOTTLS SOTTLSPrivateer Privateer should have lived on to these degenerate days for he wpuld have recognized in Exile a fraternal soul a breast in which burnt the same undying flame of worship and illumination What a grand and glorious feclin it would have produced could they have got togcther and as it were com ¬ pared nodes upon their favorite topic Truly there would have resulted therefrom a great enrichment of turf literature and I have no doubt a corresponding enlightenment among those wandering like my ¬ self in the almost stygiun darkness that envelops breeding here in the IT S A AExile Exile affirms that there is surely something wrong with breeding in America And in this tlie tum I wholly agree with him We have arrived at this common goal however by traveling as it were from different points of the compass And we ride moreover not only horses of decidedly differ ¬ ent colors but just as djffercnUy bred 1ersonally Exile is all for figures and formulas and initials and his ideal thoroughbred I infer is composed thereof It has taproots galore and nothing more all those disfigured indigenes that emerged in those eras known aj ancient history in a racing sense from our American tall timber being rigidly excluded even as Plato tic renowned philosopher sternly banished all petticoats from his ideal republic Now with me It is all thp other way Icare nothing whatever about figures 1 am entirely innocent of formulas not to say crassly and tinpardonably so If I tabulated a pedigree and in my time I have somewhat extensively done so it would never occur to me to decorate it with initials And as for our indigenous hoipolloi of roots without taps or taps without roots just as you please I confess not merely to a sneaking fondness for cm but an actual and public toleration tolerationWhat What is the matter with breeding in America It 13 not difllcult to gather from the observations of Exile that the chief difficulty is our lack of pur sang that is to say of pedigrees made up exclusively of British blood the nearer the better J confess my inability to share these sentiments To me one of the chief things that has stopped progress here is the attitude during the last few dec i ades of our American breeders toward their own productions j used to be said that when it was raining in London everybody cm our Atlantic scabpard turned up their trousers or lifted their umbrellas I That same spirit of the sedulous ape did not among our breeders at that time prevail to nearly such an extent as it docs today and I may say that comparatively speaking we were at that time pro ¬ ducing horses relatively Just as good as compared with the English ones as we are today todayAH AH this pride in the native product has died down almost to nothing in the past twenty years that is in a breeding sense Our breeders today may bo likened to a little band of imitators who have waded out into the Atlantic as far as they can got whie some of them have gone clear across in order to approach as near the sacred fount as possible They are far more sensitive to what goes on at Newmarket than tbeir predecessors ever were and have fits and spasms faithfully whenever the cables or wireless indicate the proper moment To me it is a pathetic and somewhat grotesque spcctacle And just as long as the situation which it typifies continues to endure just that long will there be something the matter with breeding in America The opinion now prevails that good horses can be obtained in America only by importing them or their sires and dams from England with possihiy an occasional rarity from France or the Antipodes The native born rapidly approach the estateof pariahs in their own land landNeedless Needless to say that no country ever produced anything worth boasting about on its own account by working under this system And none ever will If you have not a sturdy faith in your own pro ¬ ductions you will never bo anything but a feeble exploiter of sciifetliifig handfid down from higher up a dealer in secondhand goods and a producer of near articles Everything history philosophy science art sport the whole human scheme of tilings enforces this moral
