Italian Heavy Drafts, Revisited

I originally tried to research and pedigree my lone Italian Heavy Draft mare back in January, but it did not have a fruitful ending. I left my followers with a few links, to a farm website and a breed organization, as well as one "under maintenance".

SFC Vegas

For a brief recap-- Italian Heavy Drafts are more commonly known as Cavallo Agricolo Italiano Da Tiro Pesante Rapido, or TPR for short. They are bred for meat, and they are relatively rare as horse breeds go. Their most common color is chestnut, but they do come in bay and roan. I have not seen evidence of gray, nor of sabino. There *may* be rabicano.

I took up the challenge this past week, and I had much much more luck! For starters, I revisited the breed's main website-- http://www.anacaitpr.it/ . Unless you can read Italian (?), I would suggest using Google's translate, which can translate whole websites for you, into your preferred language.

On the front page, there are several links. SOGGETTI IN VENDITA means something along the lines of For Sale, and I found a lovely older mare to fit my purposes of filling a stallion pedigree to accompany my broodmare, so I would at least have a breeding pair. I still intended to find a roan, but that would come later. And so, I pedigreed SFC Richter as a full sibling to Remi (r).

SFC Richter

There are also other helpful links- Stalloni in F.A. loosely translates to currently available stallions, as I understood it, and there are three very attractive, albeit young, stallions to choose from. The other links lead to other possibly helpful pages for the more avid researcher, but those two led to the best picture/pedigree sources.

The biggest breakthrough came when I checked the website that had been under maintenance last time, caitpr.org. It was back up and running, and boy was it helpful! The most important link is at the very top- Archivio Fotografico CAITPR, Photo Archive. Here, they have pictures of current stallions and mares, as well as names of their sires/dams/damsires. Goldmine! I found not one, but a couple roans that I could choose from, and happily pedigreed my mare. I also crossed her with the lone bay stallion I could find to create a 2013 bay roan colt in my stable. He won't be able to breed for some time, but he will have a fuller pedigree and a hard to find color, once he does!

SFC Georgi

Other important information for us Pedigree Assigners--

The horses are roughly named with a certain letter per year. I copied out the "formula" below:

A- 2007

B-2008

C- 2009

D- 1990/2010

E- 1991

F- 1992

G- 1993

I- 1994

L- 1995

M- 1996

N- 1997

O- 1998

P- 1999

Q- 2000

R- 2001

S- 2002

T- 2003

U-2004

V-2005

Z-2006

From D on, each successive letter is for years after 2010, so E=2011, F-2012, etc. Another way to remember it is that they are 20 years apart (20 letters of the alphabet used), so D=1990/2010, E='91/ '11, etc. This helps when you want to backtrack into the '70s and '80s. Using this, you can gauge what year a sire/dam was born based on the first letter of the name, as well as what years they had foals.

Other helpful vocabulary to know, as far as I could deduce:

Stallioni- stallion

Fattrici- mare

Puledro- Colt

Puledra- Filly

Ubero- roan

Baio- bay

Sauro- chestnut

Please leave your comments below, especially if this article helped you, or if you have any questions for me. Thanks!