These days, when chilled semen makes any stallion available anywhere in Germany, it is only the very top stallions that attract decent books of mares – and increasingly, and worryingly for the breeding authorities in that pace-setting district of Hanover, only the most recently licensed, heavily promoted newest young stars at that. Previously the Hanoverian horse breeders were more likely to trust the judgement of the Stud Director in Celle, and if he sent a horse to their district, they used him. And, because they had basically only been using locally based stallions for the last couple of decades, the local mare band was one of concentrated blood, and if the stallion had one good result, then he was likely to have a large number of successful foals.
Dr Bade, director of Celle from 1979 to 2007 agreed with me that the current degree of choice means that some of the younger stallions get less opportunity, and the radical outcross is less likely to emerge:
“That is a problem of our time – some stallions get no chance. We do a strong selection for the young stallions, each year for the state stud we test about 40 stallions and only keep about six or eight but the trouble is that all of those six or eight stallions don’t get the same chance, and some of them don’t get any chance at all because breeders talk and talk.”
“In former times the breeders had no chance to go by trailer for hundreds of kilometres, or order semen from here or there – they used the stallions that were sent to their district, and then several years later they could see which stallions were the best, and often it would be the stallion that they didn’t think was going to be the best, and the one they thought was going to be best was not so good. Now there is not such an opportunity. If the stallion has a good performance test and we have good photographs, good coverage, and we push them, then the breeders will breed to that stallion – but we have lots of good stallions that don’t get that chance.”
Duellant – no chance today?
“Take the example of Duellant in his time nobody would take him. He went to the station at Landesbrück, as the second stallion, no-one remembers the first stallion any more. After two or three years, Duellant was a champion, but I think that would be impossible now.”