Italian Heavy Drafts

I seem to find myself immersed in languages I have absolutely no knowledge of, and it is mind-boggling, but satisfyingly challenging.

This week's hunt is for parents of a red roan Italian Heavy Draft mare. So far, I have had no success, but I at least wanted to make a post to share some of my findings.

The words Italian Heavy Draft don't do much in a web search beyond bringing up a ton of websites regarding all the different breeds of horse, and then they only have a paragraph of two for each one.

The most helpful was here- http://www.theequinest.com/breeds/italian-draft/, specifically

"Also called the Italian Working Horse, the Rapid Heavy Draft & the Cavallo Agricolo Italiano da Tiro Pesante Rapido..."

That last bit is the winner. When researching breeds popular in a country with a language predominantly not English, try to search using the horse's common name. Also, make sure your search engine's options allow websites to come through that are in other languages than English (you can always use a translator on them).

That quickly got me to their main breed website: http://www.anacaitpr.it/anacaitpr/anacaitpr.asp?pg=english

From there, under Genetic Indexes on the main page, they have a few pdf lists of the stallions and mares alive, as well as foals born in 2011/2012. But sadly, no extended pedigrees, or links to breeder websites.

My next step was to google search some of the stallion names that pop up often, indicating they may have been popular. I picked Kvarner second after Zuleico didn't get me much. However, instead of searching Kvarner, I used the name as it is listed untranslated- "Quarnaro". That, when searching under google images, got me to a forum, where someone had kindly listed photos of studs, along with their names, some of which I recognized from earlier.

http://www.forumcavallo.it/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=975&p=16101&hilit=quarnaro#p16101

At least I'm able to match a few names to pictures/color now! 



I did find one, oh, just one, breeder website. They kindly list their horses, and include photos, info, and what looks like registration papers, although the print is small, and unfortunately for me, none of the horses appears to be roan.
http://www.politopo.com/TPR/?page_id=16

This site looks promising-- http://caitpr.org/ but as of this posting, it was offline for maintenance. Who knows for how long or if permanently.

The Suffolk Punch

This will be a short post, considering I only have one Suffolk currently in my stable at this time. So I figured it would be a quick and easy pedigree task. Not quite. Suffolks aren't very popular, and they aren't even listed as a breed option in allbreedpedigree's site, so they show up as either Draft or Other, which isn't very helpful. Luckily, many of them have photos attached.

I found two society's that provide stallion lists:

http://suffolkhorsesociety.org.uk/stallion-list/

This one has younger horses, but no extended pedigrees. A few show up in allbreed, with quite extensive pedigrees filled in, as compared with the horses listed at-

http://www.suffolkpunch.com/horses/staindex.html
http://www.suffolkpunch.com/horses/stalphot.html
http://www.suffolkpunch.com/horses/mares.html

I listed all three pages because different info can be found on each one. Many of the horses there are lucky to have grandparents listed, if they show up at all.

I didn't need to dig any deeper than those pages to find a full pedigree for my stud, but I have a feeling finding future pedigrees for any mares to pair with him could turn out to be a daunting research task.

Purdy Pictures

Sometimes, all a girl wants to do is dream.

Check out this site http://www.markjbarrett.ifp3.com/#/page/home/ for some drool worthy photos of horses. (Image Galleries > Horses Galleries)

Camargues

My pedigree-the-orphans problem made it to the C's, where Camargues were the first in line.

I started my search by typing Camargue horse breeders into the search engine.

The first link wasn't very helpful pedigree-wise, but it did provide the name of the registry that handles Camargues.

That led me to their website, which is in French. I think. http://www.aecrc.com/index.php


Thanks to Google's translate site, which helpfully translates whole websites in one shot, and even translates concurrent pages when links are clicked, I produced a legible website.

The last page, called Camargue Stallions, led to a listing of stallions, some even "28 years old", with links to their breeder's websites. This is perfect for filling in those older BSOs I have orphaned. The only downside is most of the pedigrees only have the parents and maybe grandparent lines filled in. If they are anything like mustangs-they seem to be left semi-wild in some cases-even this is a blessing.

While under Google's translate, you can click on any of the breeder websites and Google will translate them as well. This is extremely handy if you need to research a specific horse some more.

Addition 1: I stumbled up on this helpful site (long, because the google translate link included for my English-only readers): here.

Addition 2: I found a snippet of a line in the stud book rules that horses are named with a specific letter per year. All they had listed was 2003= P. This was further supported when I checked the Breeder's Association website and noticed all the horses of the same age had names starting with the same letter (keep in mind if you're looking at the translated version some of the names translate differently, but if you hover over them, Google will show you the original text).

From this, I deduced this list (feel free to copy, paste, save, whatever):

1988- A
1989- B
1990- C
1991- D
1992- E
1993- F
1994- G
1995- H
1996- I
1997- J
1998- K
1999- L
2000- M
2001- N
2002- O
2003- P
2004- Q
2005- R
2006- S
2007- T
2008- U
2009- V
2010- A
2011- B
2012- C
2013- D

Happy parent hunting!

American Saddlebreds

In an effort to get something done, I decided to bring up my trusty Excel spreadsheet, start at the top, and work my way down until I found a horse that wasn't pedigreed. Needless to say, I didn't make it very far.

(The first row of x's to the far right is pedigreed. The second is for the personal pages I was trying to create for each horse)

I came to #32, Marionette. Originally, this was the black tobiano Breyer ASB Stablemate, but I ended up changing to a chestnut colored GC Micro Mini because a BSO came into my possession that the previous owner had assigned to the exact body, and I couldn't help keeping it the same.

The new Marionette

I began my search as usual- I typed something along the lines of World Champion American Saddlebred into my Yahoo search bar and browsed through the breeder listings proclaiming their horses as either World Champions themselves, or related. Eventually, I became so sick of seeing Will Shriver, Supreme Sultan, Wing Commander, Anacacho Shamrock, and Bourbon Genius King, that I started to look for horses without any of these in their lines. Finally, I found Telemark, and thought- Perfect! Not all of my horses need to be related to winners; I need some outcrosses to lesser known horses for balance, too.

But what to do for a mare? I moved on to look at the other ASBs that needed sires and/or dams, as my searching was turning up other interesting horses. I came across The Mistress of Motion, a mare lacking the overflow of popular horses listed above, with a wonderful champagne color. Ooh! Can I get some of that in my stable? But where? Ah....what exactly is the color of that foal?

Spring Valleys Mistress

She could pass as an amber champagne-- a GC version of one, anyway. What a weird hair color, and her leg shading. And her hooves aren't exactly black, either. Well, I assigned her that mare as a dam, and went on the hunt for a bay sire, since amber champagnes have a bay base color. I did find one- Spring Valleys Deliverance, but too late I realized he appears in a few of my other horses' pedigrees. I guess that's not a bad thing- less so than having too many Wing Commanders, anyway.

And then I thought- why not make her the dam to my motherless Marionette? They're supposed to be mother-daughter anyway, if you follow GC's packaging thinking. I could just switch them around. Marionette is very probably just a basic chestnut, but while I was looking up champagnes, there were a few called self-colored champagnes, or dark gold champagnes. Meaning that their mane/tail were approximately the same color as their body, instead of being lighter. That will work! And so I had two champagne-carriers in my herd.

Ah, I'm almost done! Or so I thought. Spring Valleys Mistress' photo was still in my To Identify folder of pictures (Yes, I know, not a very clever name, but its to the point!) All my orphans reside in there. It is sort of a black hole, as it somehow creates more than I originally put in. Does that mean I'm on the "wrong" side of the hole?! I digress. I found them-

Bah! Forgot about them. If you look closely, you'll see Saddlebred down in the corner, in some languages other than English. This is one of my more precious imports from Germany or the UK. The mare is pretty easy- a basic black (although I noticed there are slim picking of black ASBs in comparison with the chestnuts!). But what the heck is going on with that stallion? At first guess I went with sabino. But a sabino American Saddlebred Yahoo search turned up something more interesting- Center Ring. http://www.allbreedpedigree.com/center+ring

What an interesting -and familiar- facial marking! Now, Center Ring has a lot more leg white, but as a minimal splash overo, who's to say that crossing on a solid mare wouldn't cut down on the amount of leg white? Now I just needed a pretty black mare. Masquerade SLS fit just fine.

Success! Not only did I get two champagnes ASBs into my stable, but I somehow bred a splash overo as well!

Uploading, Uploading, Uploading

As much as I wanted to be doing more important and productive model horse related tasks today (such as dusting, organizing, taking new photos, and PAing orphans), all of the day was devoted to uploading photos. And I'm not done yet! My Breyer, Resin, and Other Make entries are all entered in the ABMHA 2012 championship show on photobucket. Luckily, I had just typed in the info for the last OM when photobucket spazzed out on me and called me a Bad Error 400, or something like that.

So, tomorrow, I will finish the last category (and perhaps my biggest)--GC's!

And then I can begin the long and tedious uploading of my photos onto MHFC's new showing platform, which I am super excited about. (The new platform, not the long and tedious uploading ^.^)

I did, however, end up taking one new photo with my latest setup. Red Robin was in desperate need of a new photo, as the old one had harsh lighting, bad angles, too much dust, oversized footing, and it was just, well, old! I am very pleased with how this one turned out.


Alas, the fun side of the hobby must wait for another day!