⁉️ Can You Really Breed for a Saddle Moment?
Recently I came across a weird study. A study that claims we might be able to genetically predict whether a horse will make it to competitions or not. Not whether they’ll succeed. Not how they’ll move, think, or feel. Just whether they’ll be started
The logic goes something like this. If enough horses aren’t being started by a certain age, maybe it’s not training, market forces, injuries, or something as simple as sheer bad luck. Cause just maybe it happens to be heredity.
The authors, who first of all seem slightly bias to the Swedish Warmblood system, looked at a lot of horses [Swedish Warmbloods, what else... ] to find out if "being started under saddle" could be considered a heritable trait.
A binary one, no less. Either the horse is started (1), or it isn’t (0).
Then they did what scientists tend to do. Which mean they ran a whole lot of numbers, to produce a few modest heritability scores, and concluded there might actually be a genetic influence at play.
My very own, and very much unscientific conclusion of their study?
A total nonsense study, based on internal numbers and a thesis with a freakishly scary prospect future.
At least if the complex relationships in between horse and man of the kind that lead to starts, delays, or soft retirements one day might be tied into the breeding values. Cause here’s the thing.
You can’t quantify caution.
You can’t code a rider’s hunch.
You can’t boil down a trainer’s decision, whether made on instinct, injury, or pure feel into a binary column marked "yes" or "no."
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Furthermore, it is highly questionable if you can even label this type of study as science in the first place. Especially not when the system it’s based upon is run by the same organisation drawing conclusions from its very own studbook.
Is it interesting that some bloodlines are more likely to be brought along to the arena? Sure it is.
Does that mean the horse itself was more "startable" out of genetics? Or does it mean it just happened to be going through better marketing channels, or had an owner that was more invested, or was lucky with soundness?
The study might be aiming to help breeders make smarter choices.
Personally I seriously question how people and organisations even get funding for a [BS] thing like this in the first place.
But the questionable ways the oh so many crap studies out there gets funding, is not even the worst part.
The worst part of it would be a future where this nonsense actually does end up in any kind of future breeding evaluation programs, and by doing so reduces horses even further away from individuals, and instead turn them into data points in a breeding algorithm.
Do We Really Need a Study to Know This?
💬 If this made you think, please pass it on to a fellow horse person and let’s keep the conversation going.