A Face Only a Mother Can Love

Another foaling season has come and gone, and this means top breeders across the country have put a new crop of future champions on the ground. It also means that hundreds of 'backyard breeders' have put their own versions of good horse flesh on the ground.


Let's face it: we all know someone who has too much time on his or her hands and an old hay-bellied mare in the back field that they decide suddenly needs to procreate (as if there aren't already enough horses on the planet). Next thing we know, this person employs his or her entire equine reproductive knowledge, which amounts to having read one article in Equus magazine a few years ago, finds a stallion with a cheap stud fee, and puts the mare in foal.


A year later, the new "breeder" is standing back looking at the world's most poorly assembled, ugly baby horse deciding it is so exceptional that its mother must be bred again immediately to produce another such offspring. And so on and so forth. In the industry, we call this "barn blindness." It is defined as the sheer inability to see one's own horses for what they actually are.


Horse overpopulation aside, I find this trait somewhat charming. Lord knows I was an ugly duckling as a child and my parents had the audacity to shield me from that fact. So, when backyard breeders see their nonathletic and unattractive foals as future world champions, my heart patters a little. In fact, I like to keep abreast of the barn blindness epidemic by scanning the horses for sale classifieds.



I find folks "proudly" offering for sale a Quarter Horse-donkey-Warmblood cross that more reputable breeders would only consider a genetic mistake. I find promises of "highly talented" draft horse/Arabian mixes. I read captions to photos under a Neanderthal-looking head that say: gorgeous refined face. And see, that's the beauty of barn blindness. Where I see a prehistoric looking profile that's barely recognizable as belonging to a horse, the animal's backyard breeder sees a majestic representation of the Equus species.


After many jolly years of poking fun at those suffering from barn blindness, my father fell into the backyard breeding habit last year. A highly successful carriage driving trainer, my father is also a stubborn New Englander. This means that once he arrives at an opinion (after much hemming and hawing...), he absolutely cannot be talked out of it. So it went last year when he reported his plan to breed his Hackney mare to a Friesian stallion.


"Are you serious?" I asked him and then gave him a feverish explanation for why this was a poor idea. Neither mare or stallion had good temperaments nor conformation. Moreover, who on earth had ever heard of a Hackney-Friesian cross?


Well, Rosie (the Hackney) needed to do something since she'd only been standing in a field for the past three years and he had this Friesian stallion right here in his barn, so why not?, he said. And--voila-- my father evolved from trainer to 'breeder.' Foaling season came and went and I didn't hear from my father. Worried that something may have gone wrong for the mare, I called him to check in.

Don't worry, Rosie was fine, except for now being the mother of the world's least desirable offspring. My father hadn't called me because his foal experiment had yielded a baby animal that for the first week wasn't easily identified as a horse. Dad said it looked like something between a dinosaur and a Great Dane. Lovely. He admitted that the backyard breeding habit may not have been a good idea...

Then, within a few weeks, his barn blindness started to develop and he stopped seeing the Hackney-Friesian for what it was. Suddenly, he started speaking fondly of it, planning a future for it, speaking of its "remarkable" looks and so on and so forth. He started referring to 'hidden talents,' the way a parent talks themselves into agreeing to let their child with two left feet enter a dance contest. I asked him what he'd named the foal.

Bucket head.

Huh?

"Well, yeah. I figured the name fit 'em, because if you put a bucket over his head, he's not a bad lookin' horse," Dad explained. And there you have it. A future world champion with a bucket on his head.