DW

Go to the sales tomorrow and buy yourself a yearling filly out of the best families in NZ Klairessa, one went through the ring today for $500. Approach a trainer you like and get them to look at your selections and an estimate of price, then try bidding a 5th of your budget, do the bidding and buying yourself because it's alot of fun and scarry at the same time, and youve got to love what you buy as youll be looking at it a long time. If you manage to buy a filly, get it scoped, then approach the transporters to get it home, assuming you have good horse pastures, otherwise sort it out with a trainer. Make sure the yearling goes into a safe yard after purchase to let down. Its hard to buy into the good families any other way, unless youve got megabucks, even then you can spend millions for a dud. If you go to the broodmare and mixed bloodstock sale the mare can come home with a virus and abort and its 3 years before you get a foal and another 3 years before you are racing, and if you are breeding to sell, there are even more pitfalls a newbie can fall into. Meantime you can learn all about racing, placing horses in the right races, breaking in and handling, feeding regiemes, black type and all the other termenology, and you can start learning about breeding by reading books and talking to people while you are racing, and working out future plans fo your filly. Ken McLean writes great books, Jack Glengarry and Ross De Bourg write on the NZ breeds, Bart Cummings books are interesting and so is Patric Hogan's book with a few insights on girth size, heart score, will to win, temprement etc. Have fun

punters club challenge tomorrow and i was hoping to back the team, but most are scratched, hope everything is okay, guess the crossing was too bad

Nothing wrong with Jimmy Choux's pedigree, its' funny that a race between Jimmy Choux and More Joyous is mentioned because they are related. Thorn Park comes from a branch of the Denises Joy family which has had a few stallions Christmas Tree was one. They can get a distance also and they get better with time according to a 75 page pedigree analisis that ive just completed on a 2year old colt i have out of joyfulness ex denises joy but i cant go into any more detail as my computer crashed and died last night without me backing up the data on a external hard drive, a troj chepvil.sm virus going around. 40mil was to much for so you think to hold out on I just hope the 8figure offer for Jimmy choux is too small and the owners at least retain some breeding rights.

Dear Don, it is normal to guestion the meaning of life when you have lost, and religion is tied to that loss, Ive attended a fue funerals since the earth moved down here and many elderly and sick have gone since, probably due to stress taking out the heart or electrical system in the body, what you are going through we call a mortality check or crises. As to the magic of life or in life and think of how a radio works and you may get some answers.

Read Ken McLeans book designing speed in a racehorse and he talks about it, including fast twitch muscle in the nuczzzus of the egg, this info has been around a while, think about down syndrome is usually due to faulty eggs rather than chromosomial dna abberations or mutations so there are more to eggs than meet the eye but purists would argue that dna chromisomes were defective in down so it depends on your perspective, common theory is that the female presents 80 percent of the horse so all this hype arround stallions is surperfoulous

Mr Hao I always find your discussions interesting, Im partway through "The Bloodhorse Authoritive guide to Breeding Thoroughbreds" book where they discuss heterozygous and homozygous DNA and the book "Tesio in his own words" discussed the failure to breed on to the fourth generation the ability of the father, grandfather and great grandfather to win say a Derby along with the fact that a full brother of a champion can be a nag. One interesting theory that I heard from a bovine breeder was that twin cows failed to reproduce, fact or theory? Does this happen in horses? I know that Danehill was a twin the other pinched in utro but what of the mare that was a twin, perhaps pinching saves their furtility?

Only spend $10,000 it will cost them 30-40,000 to get it to the races, why not take a leaf out of the Melbourne Cup owners and go buy a gelding that has finished flat racing but would love to go jumping.

The Festival can punch above weight also as the South Island buyers get there for the day or 2

Enjoy your postings, their was an author who came through withBomac leacture series a few years ago that had published a huge and expensive book on horse behaviour along the lines of Equitania or similar and had compiled alot of the published research. Many times the alpha female will be replaced by her daughter and in the herd situation many played different roles, but I tend to agree with another posting discussing horses coming from different roles and personalities becoming the champion. Certainly DNA profiling could produce some champion physical traits such as fast twitch muscle, big hearts enabling higher oxigan intake and conversion and quicker lactic acid conversion, similary lung capacity, and a horse can loose confidence and can produce greatness when more confident and this can be trained. I just read Jerry Bailey's book, great, and he discusses Cigar and how many losses he had before they switched him to dirt and he won 10+ in a row, did he always have the will to win but couldnt do it on the turf , did he mature and strenghten up and finaly hit his strapps or had he run on the dirt when he was younger would have been winning then too. Try reading The Outlanders and his research indicates it's miles on the legs or time 10,000 hours truley great vs 8.000 better than average vs 3000 average and that people who love what they are doing, do it more often and this surely would build stronger pathways in the brain and hardwire autopilot. If you then think it can be trained then the one trainer would dominate which is what tommy smith thought with phar lap and used the same training methods on so many youngsters with only a small degree of sucess coming to the realisation that phar lap had been a truely exceptional racehorse, if will to win was measurable with a dna test then would only the wealthy own the great horses, what would that do to the industry, the concept that a great horse can come from anywhere gives us all the hope of breeding, buying a future champion.

Just another thought, what genetic package height goes into, dominant, recesive or spacefiller, when you think about the human race or horses there are natural limits, natures limits, the exceptions to the rule are usually anomolies from malfunction of genetic blueprint, ie paturity gland malfuntion, so I guess there could be stallions that throw their size just as there are some that throw short legged runts, or big colts and small fillies

When I was breeding minitures the stallion could go down an inch at most, so I would guess an increase of an inch at the most was available on your mares height, it will be interesting to read further comments