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- Records of the primary breed registries show at least 100,000 fewer mares in production now than at the start of this decade.
- H&R file photo
With the economy, the horse market, and the world at large in the recessed states they're in, here's a piece of news that shouldn't come as a big surprise.
The breeding side of the horse industry, at least the side tracked by breed associations, is in recession, too. (No stats exist for grade-horse production, leaving no sure way to tell where its under-the-radar trends are headed.) In just about any breed you could name, recent records show fewer mares being bred, fewer stallions employed to breed the ones still producing, and fewer foals arriving and issued registration papers than were the norm just a few years ago.
Still, details about the decline probably will surprise some. For instance, the pullback's not new. It's been underway, in most breeds, for about eight years. Comparing the latest mares-in-production statistics to those of 2000, when many breeds' production was at or near a 25-year peak, at least 100,000 registered broodmares have lost their jobs.
Furthermore, as it's become socially, emotionally and financially contagious, the less-breeding trend has picked up speed. In one breed, for instance, where numbers had been in gradual retreat since the start of this decade, the breeding rate plunged last year alone by 36 percent.
"So what's the big deal?" you may be asking. "Less breeding equals fewer horses, and that's a good thing for the horse world nowadays, right?"
It might be, if fewer foals were the only effect of a breeding recession. But no recessionary dynamics are ever quite that simple. Here's a look at how a changed breeding economy is sending other changes your way--some of them uncomfortable, if not downright painful.
Reversal of Fortune
Al Dunning, a professional horseman and Arizona state director for the American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA), was sitting at the 2008 AQHA Convention when attendees were told something that he says "shocked us all."
The announcement: After climbing steadily for the better part of a generation, Quarter Horse registrations had taken a single-year drop of nearly 30,000 head. And it wasn't just a blip for 2007. The 2008 total was projected (and proved to be) in the same dropped-off range, down some 30,000 horses from the '05 and '06 totals that reached 165,000 each.
The cutback ended a Quarter Horse breeding expansion that got underway in 1991, and that poured millions--via breeding and collection fees, advertising dollars, veterinary fees, feed purchases, equipment buys and much more--into the general equine economy.
According to Dunning, the new information was a wake-up call that prompted further adjustment to many breeders' programs.
"A lot of us could feel that things had been changing, but the proof ended up bigger than we expected," he says.
Noting that a big drop in breeding is a response to reduced demand for horses, Dunning divulges his own response.
"I dispersed all my own broodmares, and started counseling my ranch-owner customers to breed only their best to the best, or else not breed at all. When people can't sell their young stock for what they have in them--and when nothing but the very, very top prospects are in demand--it only makes sense for them to make these changes."
Nevertheless, the Team Horse & Rider member sees and questions the ironies in that very advice.
"When people deliberately cut breeding, what happens to the sudden influx of broodmares with no jobs? How do we keep them from turning into another layer of unwanted horses? How does a breed retain its genetic diversity when breeding choices narrow to a select group of stallions--many of them related? How do young stallions, and even young mares, get the chance to prove themselves and create desirable lines for the future? How do we know we aren't creating the end of the middle-class horse, by encouraging more breeding to the top specialized stallions?
"You have to look at the picture from so many angles, because the whole picture has now changed."
New Realities
With another breeding season newly underway--the first since the overall economy went into a hard skid late last year--stakeholders in the breeding economy are getting ready for more changes to come.
At AQHA, for instance, the staff is leaner by 40 employees.
"We didn't lay employees off to make up for the revenue shortfall from fewer registrations," says Tom Persechino, executive director of marketing and communications. "As people left, we consolidated positions and departments instead."
