Wielkopalooza

Life has been weird lately, so yesterday I decided to submerge myself in my favorite hobby--> horses. I've been on a quest to pedigree all the orphans currently already posted on my website, stableforchampions.weebly.com. Instead of starting at the top of my List of All Horses Excel spreadsheet, I mixed it up a bit and started from the bottom.

This brought me to a bunch of Wurttembergers that were already pedigreed, and then a Wielkopolski. No idea how to pronounce that. My closest is Wee-all-ca-pole-ski. I have a feeling that W might be pronounced like a V, but I'm not familiar with Polish at all.

Charger is a Grand Champion produced in the later years of the company (~2003), so he didn't come with a name, bio card, or any other sort of identity.

SFC Charger, black Wielkopolski stallion

They did, however, create a GC Sound N Action stallion by the name of Champ, with the breed of Wielkopolski. On his bio card, his parent's names are Charger and Champagne. I decided to ID my orphan as the sire.

His colorful stockings posed me a problem. I called him a sabino, for lack of better knowledge, although I later entered him in a color show as a splash. I had no idea if Wielkopolskis came in either, so I decided to ignore it for the time being, to see what my research would turn up.

I came to find out that this breed isn't so popular here in the States. That meant I was soon perusing a lot of websites ending in .pl . Thank you, Google Translate.

The biggest help came from, not Yahoo web, but rather Yahoo Images. Doing a web search often comes up with an annoying amount of "about this breed" websites, but very little to do with actual horses or pedigrees in the breed. But an Image search produces actual horses, and a little bit of searching can get you to the host websites.

My first try found me at http://www.equigaia.com. A filter search only brought up one Wielkopolski mare for sale, but following old pictures from the Images search could get me to expired advertisements, which often included pedigrees. Here's an example-
 http://www.equigaia.com/Horses-for-sale/horse/Wielkopolski/Stallion/Poland/12653810078ijV2ngBYPCNp9dttEOsuQwlumlF3Rc1

One of the horse pictures, I think the one of Powój, led me to this site- http://ogloszenia.voltahorse.pl. Goldmine! You don't even need to put it through the Translate, as long as you know Stanówka stands for "Breeding" or something similar. There is also a handy language changer at the bottom of the left column. Click on the picture of the British flag, and most of the website goes to English. All you have to do is then sort by Breed.

Click on a horse, click on "Full Datails" and at the bottom, under "Additional Actions", click Show Family Tree. Some of the others are blocked and require you to register, but for a pedigree assigner, this is more than we can normally ask for! All of the names in the pedigree are clickable, but the amount of information varies. Still, a filled in pedigree is great!

(A side note: I also found this site-- http://www.wikihorseworld.com. I don't know where I've been, but this place is amazing.)

I -finally- found a breeder website that had information on their horses- http://www.mazurek-konie.pl/ogiery/. Again, a handy little British flag up at the top helps out us English-speaking folk. There's not much info actually with the pictures of the horses, but they have a whole separate page called Pedigree Database. This is an alphabetical list of all horses they've owned or currently own, I guess, and clicking on "przejdź by sprawdzić rodowód" takes you to their horses' pedigree information at http://www.bazakoni.pl. A whole database of horses, similar to the link I posted above. Except, by using the breeder site, you can quickly peruse a bunch of them. (Again, Advanced Search is accessible only to members).

I wanted to take a moment to point out that they bother separating Wielkopolski, Malopolska (Polish Angloarab), Wielkopolska/Trak (which I can only assume has Trakehner lines, although the horses under Wielkopolski often have heavy Trakehner lines, so this is still a mystery to me), and Trakehner into separate breed categories. Also, good luck comparing this to Allbreed, because they either have the horses listed as Trakehners or "Warmblood". If you're lucky, someone added in "Wielkopolski" under additional info, but otherwise there's not much to tell if it's registered as such. Not only that, but many of the horses as ancestors to Wielkopolskis or off the Mazurek breeder site are of the breed "szlachetna półkrew". The Translate can only get it to "steel półkrew", so I'm still not sure what it is! Can anyone enlighten me? My best guess is some sort of "Polish Warmblood" type of breed. As it is, I decided to stick with only horses with Wielkopolski as their breed, since it seems that that does not necessarily equal any of the others, or vice versa.

And then I found something interesting. Appaloosa coats! http://www.mazurek-konie.pl/klacze/ Their mare, right at the top, has a blanket. I'm not sure exactly where the patterns trace back to, but they are registerable with the WLKP. And not only that, but the cream gene exists, as well. AND the tobiano pattern. Phew. Well, that can take care of any weird palomino pintaloosa anyone might have with a sporting build.

So of course I had to take advantage of the find and create a mate for my lone Wielkopolski stallion. Unluckily, I didn't seem to have any spotty mares with the right build among by orphans, but I did have a foal. Foals are kind of a cop out with difficult breeds, since they can pass as just about anything, so I try not to do it, but she was just too cute. And she didn't want to be another boring Appaloosa, lost in the huge herd.

Sorajka, bay blanket Wielkopolski filly

I named her a mix of her dam and grandsire's names.

So, not only did I pedigree one posted orphan, I got to add a completely nameless, no-breed orphan to the website with all info! And it looks like a few tobiano Wielkopolskis will be added soon.


(Added 2/7: I found out that szlachetna półkrew means Polish Halfbred Horse, thanks to this scientific paper on how the sire's breed affects the measurements of the foals, here- http://www.ighz.edu.pl/files/objects/2103/66/strona171-180.pdf. That goes along with my instinct that the horses were a mixed breed/didn't have a specific breed, so I am glad I avoided using one as a parent. It also explains more regarding the Malopolski and the Wielkopolski, so it is worth a quick read)