Reply #3: Another thing you might want to explore.... [View All]

with Eight Belles is: was she an unsound horse? We need to put the pedigree chart down and just look at the horse. She didn't look unsound to me. She was a better physical specimen than any other horse in the Derby in my opinion. Nice big strong filly. Raced at 2 and 3 with no problems.

Was her breakdown caused by some genetic charicteristic she inherited from some stallion 5 and 6 generations back? Or was some enviromental factor the cause? Or did she just take a bad step? A theory about some mysteriouly prepotent stallion in the far reaches of a horse's pedigree is garbage. The dam and the sire determine the physical characteritcs of a horse not the "blood" of some ancestor that, by the way, was not unsound himself and got a lot of sound horses.

I know you want to talk about inbreeding. I'm really an amateur geneticist so I can only go by the what the real experts tell us. And from all I know from the literature inbreeding is really not germane to the discussion. Think of this: if it was Native Dancer, why didn't most of his horses break down? His sons and daughters were made up of 50% Native Dancer genes. We know that for sure. And of his horses that broke down how many of them broke down because of genes they inherited from the dam?

It's not as simple as the press is trying to make this sound. Nor is what they are saying true.