"Do We Need a Sturdier Racehorse?"

[Cannon Shell]

Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS

This doesn't make sense at all to me.

The more breeding you do - the better your population should get over time.

Speed wins horse races - and early developing horses are always attractive to owners - that's what the market wants.

Lets say there's no purse money for winning or order of finish at all - and horses are simply asked to race 30 times a year with limited medication for three straight years under the same training program . If you use the 5% of males who best stand up to this type of program - and keep breeding them to a hundred mares each ... I doubt you'd see a weakening breed.

Horses, however slowly they run, who can simply answer the bell over and over without much medication aren't the ones rewarded to stand stud.

The ones rewarded to stud are the ones who are simply the standout performers and can run the fastest six or seven times a year - and do so with the aid of medication that is helpful to their performance.

Winning matters. If the sport was Commie run - the breed would be a whole lot tougher even if you're letting every single female who wasn't euthanized from racing into the gene pool.

Obviously breeding isnt an exact science but in trying to breed the best horses, mares and stallions were selectively chosen, matched and culled. Mares that had the credentials to breed but failed to have good foals were taken out of the population. Stallions that did not cut it stopped breeding.

When you stop being particular about not only the paper aspects of breeding but the physical aspects then you get an inferior product.

Obviously in the 70's there was a boom in both the racetrack business as winter racing in the North expanded and more and more trakcs were open and more races were run. As the population expanded, the overall quality declined. If the NFL expanded to 90 teams, don't you think the quality of the average player would decline?