Not sure if this goes along with the purpose of the thread, but I saw this today regarding horse sports. To shorten it up, the "speed and endurance phase" of the equestrian eventers 50 years ago was approximately 18 miles, part of it with jumps, and an ideal time of approximately 1 1/2 hours. Now it's 9 minutes and only one phase left (the cross-country), no roads and tracks or steeplechase. All gone.
The title of this thread is "prioritizing for success". Breeders MUST test dogs in order to breed true. With no testing of physical & mental capabilities you have no idea what you've got under that skin. I've taken a deep dive into pedigrees lately and most all the top show dogs in the nation have zero physical working titles behind their names. Strings of CH & GCH with no proof that they can go through basic commands (CD) or take direction from a handler (agility) or have a bit of prey drive (fast cat, barn hunt), willingness to team up with handler (scent work), much less the Dobermans initial purpose, protection! I understand that not everyone wants to show or do sports and that companion dogs are all most people want. I'm talking about breeders understanding that pedigrees of dogs in the "working dog" category that haven't done a lick of any kind of work for 4 generations are insulting to our breed.
The Event horses of today are still top athletes, still at the top of their game, still good looking, but they aren't the same as 50 years ago. They are heavier, deeper, rounder in general, the greyhound-sleek look of long lean muscle has been replaced over the years... because the tests have changed. These heavier deeper muscled horses aren't built to gallop 18 miles in an hour and a half. The sport changes the horse (or dog) changes. When there is no sport at all, our dogs will morph into purely eye candy because that's the only test they are passing on.
From Tamarack HIll Farm on facebook:
When humans stop testing for some trait, breeders usually stop trying to produce it, and it goes away from the equine population.
The recent cross country course in Paris required horses to gallop at an average speed of 570 meters per minute for something over nine minutes, whereas 50 years ago, event horses at the top of that sport were asked to gallop for nineteen minutes at an average speed of just over 600 meters a minute. And it took one and a half hours or so of riding, not 9 minutes.
But what is probably the reality is that
once some trait has been lost from a breeding population, it gets pretty darn hard to get it back.
Where’s it all headed? Probably, reflecting modern crowded conditions, loss of land, loss of a sense of the possible, horse sports are shrinking in terms of the need for traits associated with toughness, stamina, endurance, soundness, and we see this in all kinds of ways, not simply in distance riding and eventing.
The attachment was what the 1974 event horses had on their plates for the World Championships just 50 years ago. Hard to imagine asking for that today of the current competitors, a fully different sport now for fully different kinds of horses.
