This message is from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (BRIAN C JACOBSEN) I'd like to give a pertinent example of stallion behavior that might either 'clear the water' or 'muddy the water' depending on whether you hold to the 'nature' or 'nurture' point of view regarding animal personalities and behavior.
The stallion Grabb has been mentioned lately, and as you know, my grandfather Harold imported him to this country when he was 19 years old. Grabb was truly magnificent, but that's a subject for another letter. The thing I want to mention here is his temperment. For most of Grabb's adult life in Norway, he was kept in a stall and the only time he was let out was for breeding. Some of you are already shaking your heads because you know what this does to a stallion. When we first brought Grabb to Colorado he was a handful to say the least! When he came running toward you from the other end of the pasture, there wasn't a person alive who wouldn't clear the fence in record time! There were no teeth bared, no ears back, nothing like that - it's just that it didn't look like he was going to stop. He was quite nippy, but we were careful and he never bit anybody. Now he was by no means uncontrollable, so don't get me wrong. It sounds like the stallion at the Evaluation that people have been mentioning was close to uncontrollable. So Grabb was not like that, but to say that he was a handful is an understatement! Now here's the good part. After two years of being turned out in a pasture with access to a stall ( we only ever found him in the stall once) he was a different horse. No longer were you afraid to be in the same corral with him. No longer was he constantly 'wound up tight'. In fact, he turned out to be rather average for a Fjord stallion I think. You could do anything you wanted to him - trim mane and hooves, vaccinate, deworm, etc. He was still 100% pure Fjord testosterone when there was a mare in heat to be bred, but even then he would listen. So Grabb is an example of a stallion whose nature was actually gentle, but whose 'nurture' made him look like something different. Grabb's offspring, both male and female, have all been very nice horses as far as personality goes. In fact, Leik (pronounced like 'lake') the son of Grabb whom we bred with for a number of years, and who is now standing at Bill and Norma Coli's Blue Heron Farm, is the gentlest Fjord stallion I have ever seen. He is a big baby doll and you can do anything you want with him. We gave him a months training to ride at the age of ten years old and he took to it like he had been doing it all his life. Don't get me wrong, when a mare in heat is around he is all business. But at the same time he is very much a gentleman, very sensitive to the mare's cues about whether she is ready or not. Although I quote this example of Grabb, I do not use it to excuse an unruly stallion's behavior. There are very definately some stallions who are just that way, even if they have been reared in the best environment possible. Here's my main point. Just as has been seen with people, a stallion's personality is a combination of nature and nurture. Psychologists have debated for years whether people are a product of their genes or their environment, but the answer always eventually comes down to the fact that it is some combination of both. And it can not be stated that it is a certain percentage of both, say 50-50, because for example two siblings, raised the same, still respond differently in similar situations. This makes it hard then to decide how one would measure this and reward or penalize it at an Evaluation. The difficulty lies mainly in two areas. First, people's definitions of unruly or dangerous are all different; Some think a stallion should not even whicker at a mare when he's being shown or handled whereas others think that is just part of being a stallion. Also, some people would rather have a bit of a heads-up, fancy-looking Fjord, and some would rather have a Fjord that's just a big pussy cat. So how do you agree on what's acceptable behavior and what's not? Secondly, temperment is not a highly heritable trait. Whereas certain conformational traits, for example, have been shown to be highly heritable, and thus either desirable or not, it is not the same with temperment. Breed a high-energy, hard to handle stallion to a quiet, gentle mare, and you may get a quiet and gentle offspring. And the offspring of that offspring may all be just as quiet and gentle as you please. So where do you draw the line? I agree that a Fjord's temperment is definitely important. It is what makes Fjords unique and is the thing which initially draws most people to the breed. So we do need to preserve it as much as possible. But we must be careful as we consider how to make that part of the Evaluation process. As long as some notation or designation is made that would alert people, I tend to think that for the most part, mare owners would bypass that stallion for breeding. I think we must be careful when talk turns to legislating a certain kind of behavior or temperment. What works in some other countries does not work as well here in the US. I am not saying this is good, but we Americans do not like to be told what we can or cannot do with *our own* horses. How about more comments on what, if anything, should be done to modify the Evaluation process? _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
