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.