Pictured is a former eight-year-old plow horse of mixed breed ancestry which was purchased for $80 on his way to a slaughterhouse.
The buyer thought the horse looked especially calm, and might be a good horse for school kids to ride.
He was.
“Snowman” also went on to become the greatest show jumper of his generation.
Two years after being sold for slaughter, Snowman won the then Triple Crown: The American Horse Shows Association Horse of the Year, Professional Horseman's Association Champion, and Champion of Madison Square Garden's Diamond Jubilee.
Pedigree is not function.
Form is not function.
Function is function.
The problem with dogs, to bring it back to that, is that nothing lines up on a pennies-per-pound axis as it does with chickens, cattle, and sheep.
Dogs that serve no function have no function to be gauged against.
Where function can be gauged, as in long-distance sled dogs, or running dogs at the track, inbreeding is rare and no colors are considered bad.
The same is true at the horse track, apparently.
At the horse racing handicapping page ( https://handicapping.pedigreeonline.com/how-to-read ) they give eight “filters against folly” to use when betting the ponies.
One of them is the Coefficient Of Inbreeding (COI):
“The COI will give you a nine generation inbreeding rating using Wright's calculation. It can generally be ignored unless you see a number over 5.00%. In that case, there's almost too much inbreeding in the horse's pedigree. A number over 10% indicates too much inbreeding and generally such horses don't do well at the track..... The COI should be ignored most of the time. The majority of horses will have a COI around 2-3% and this generally isn't a problem. The higher is is though, the more of a problem inbreeding is likely to be. Be wary of horses with a COI over 5% and especially cautious of horses with a COI over 10%.”
How does this compare to the COI of pedigree dogs?
As Carol Beauchat notes, summarizing work done by Dayna L. Dreger et al in 2016:
“Most breeds of dogs are highly inbred, with average values that exceed the inbreeding level that results from the mating of half-siblings (12.5%). In fact, more than half of the breeds had average inbreeding coefficients greater than 25%, equal to mating full siblings from unrelated parents. This means that for many breeds, most breedings involve a sire and dam that are more similar genetically than full siblings.”
Right.
And is any of this new information?
It is not.
In the Bible we read: “Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother." [Deuteronomy 27:22]
So does this mean the way to win Bjg Money at the track is to buy calm horses and tall lanky dogs at the slaughter pens?
Maybe not. But it’s a sure bet that mandated inbreeding within a small, closed registry is the path to failure.
