Horses and Pigeons

   Before I get into what I want to discuss it would be a good idea for you to click on the links. One is a little bit about pigeons and pigeon racing and the second is an article from Sports Illustrated about a Hall of Fame trainer, Hirsch Jacobs.

http://www.fbipigeons.com/PIGEON%20FACTS.htm

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1072721/1/index.htm

   I met Hirsch Jacobs in the late fifties at a pigeon convention in Atlantic City. I had already been into handicapping for a number of years and I was very excited to meet him. When I let him know I was a pigeon flyer we commenced to have a nice conversation.
   Since it was over 50 years ago, I don't remember what was said word for word. I had started to ask him questions about horses, even at that early time I was very interested in breeding, and he asked me how I was doing with the pigeon racing. I told him I was doing great even though I only kept a small number of birds. He told me that, "The same principals apply to horse racing as to pigeon racing, if you can breed and condition pigeons, you can do it with horses".
   Of course, I never saw him again but I always kept his words in my mind. I bred and raced homing pigeons for over 30 years and had a lot of success at it. I won and placed in a lot of Futurity races. I had a lot of great moments with the birds but I especially remember the first race I ever flew. Actually I didn't fly, the bird did, but that's the term used when entering birds in a race. It was a 100 mile race from Carlisle, PA and normally would have been about a 2 hour race. It turned out that the birds hit a storm and out of over 7,000 birds in the race only 6 got home that day. My bird placed 6th but was the only bird home in my section and I won the club race, and all the money. Great feeling!
   I still have a number of friends that are very prominent flyers and breeders that send birds all over the world to race. There is a lot of money in these races. A few of my friends send birds to the big race in Las Vegas, http://lvrpd.com/ and to the Snowbird in CA, http://www.fvcsnowbird.com/. We use to go out there for those races and one year one of our gang won pretty big. The real money is in the betting pools, and man do they bet. My buddie, who has also retired to the mountains and lives about 10 miles from me, won about $45,000. Mind you, this is all on a cash basis and when the bets are made a lot of it is done in small bills and that's what you get paid with. He and his wife had money stuffed everywhere when they left.
   There is a race in Africa that's worth a million bucks and some huge ones in China, Japan and Europe.
   Actually, the heart of pigeon racing was Belgium where it's THE national sport. And it was from Belgium that all the very best birds came from. A very close friend of mine, from boyhood days, starting importing birds from Belgium back in the early sixties and he soon was a top notch flyer around the country.
   By now your probably wondering, what has this got to do with horse racing? I've tried to lay just a little ground work so you would know that pigeon racing in some countries is bigger than horse racing and there is a ton of money spent in it. I still have a few friends that own pigeons and race horses. One guy sells pigeons all over the world and races his horses at PRX.
   My object of this writing is to show you how I applied what I learned from pigeon breeding to horse breeding. There are many ways to read a pedigree and most have their own interpretations. In my years of breeding racing birds I spent hundreds of hours making up and studying pedigrees. I observed the practical results and I pored over the pedigrees of fanciers whose birds were the most sought after in the world. I learned a lot and found it to be very useful to gauge the pedigrees of horses.
   There is an old Viking proverb that says, "Tis better to marry the worst maiden from a good family, than to marry the best maiden from a bad family".
   I found that the females were the real key to breeding good offspring. I could take any number of very good males and mate each with a number of hens. I might mate a particular cock (male) with many hens over a period of years and get a few nice ones. Doing this with a number of males and then switching them around over the course of many years I found, as did a lot of other breeders, that no matter who the males were, the best birds always came from basically the same hens. Pigeon breeders value champions because it proves that the inherent ability is there. But many breeders breed what we call stock birds. These are brothers or sisters to very high class birds but they are not raced. Stock birds are kept for breeding purposes and have a high degree of success breeding champions.
   Not to get too long winded here, let me explain how I started applying this to horse racing. To begin with I'm sure you know all about the syndication of champion horses for breeding purposes. There are millions of dollars to be made and that is the reason that our champions are retired at an early age. The owners just can't wait for the money to start rolling in. A stallion can cover on average about 60 mares in a season but now they are to the point of shipping them to the southern hemisphere so as to cover another 60. Just do the math, about a hundred mares covered at say fifty thousand a pop and your talking serious money.
   If a stallion covers a hundred mares a year that means about a thousand foals in ten years. Out of that thousand, how many are winners? How many are champions? I think it is a very small percentage of any kind of winners and a much smaller percentage of champions. And, I'm not quoting statistics even though I know they can be found with research, I would wager that most of the good ones have been produced by mares that almost always throw good ones. These same good producing mares will produce good ones with almost any good stallion. That is my opinion and that's the direction I take when looking at pedigrees.
   Looking at the immediate stallion to try to determine if the offspring have the ability to conquer at the classic distances is virtually a waste of time. Looking at the distance capabilities of the sire doesn't mean a thing,as in Smarty Jones.
   When a champion is found to be prepotent, which means the ability to pass on his good genes to another generation, such as Northern Dancer who was the grandson of the mighty Nearco, they are the foundation of a family of champions. Prepotent sires are really as scarce as hen's teeth. What a horse does on the track has nothing to do with what he may sire. Of course, in horse breeding or any type of breeding, breeders always try to breed the best to the best. This doesn't always work out in practise however. There have been some mighty good ones bred from unraced horses.
   Another noteworthy item is sires that are able to pass on their genes through their daughters. One such is Nashua, although a great race horse in his own right, was never able to sire a champ. If you look through the pedigrees of a lot of champions you will see his name as the sire of great producing females.
   Probably the greatest breeder of all time was Federico Tesio who bred Nearco and Ribot. Nearco was the son of Phalaris who I call the sire of modern racehorses. There is much written about the influence of the Native Dancer line through his son Mr. Prospector who was out of a daughter of Nashua.
   So where are we today? In the last forty years or so there have been only 3 sires who have sired more than one derby winner. When Bold Ruler, who I consider one of the greatest horses of my time, I saw him run several times and he was truly magnificent winning 23 of 33 starts, sired Big Red it signaled the beginning of our modern racehorse. Being the son of Nasrullah and grandson of Nearco. Soon after his son Bold Bidder sired two derby winners. Another that sired two derby winners was Alydar who was himself, out of a daughter of Nasrullah.
      So what I'm trying to say without writing a book about it is that today we have basically one family or line of horses that can all be traced back to Phalaris. The greatest percentage of champions are sired by the Nearco line or the dam is of that line.
   When I look at a pedigree I look at the overall picture, not at individuals. Since my work has taught me that the females, who after all can only produce one foal a year, are where the pot of gold lies, the placement of the females in the pedigree is of the utmost importance.
   Nine of the last 13 derby winners had a dam of the Nearco line. The other females in the pedigree must be properly placed in relation to the dam. I think a fun thing to do would be if those of you who like to read pedigrees would try to find the "Common Denominators" and post some comments about what you found. Of course you are welcome to tell me I'm full of crap also but that won't bother me because I've played about 75% of the derby winners in the last 15 years. Anyway, this is all a lot of fun to play with.

PS- If I don't die in the near future and can find the energy, I just might write that book.
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