ATTRACTING sufficient customers is one of the challenges facing stallion owners, while the fragmented Irish Draught situation should “not be put under the carpet.”

That was according to Professor Jack Murphy, currently doubling as acting chairman of both Horse Sport Ireland’s Breeding Sub-board and the Irish Horse Board Co-operative Society.

He spoke to The Irish Field at the HSI stallion inspections last week where he had observed “a range of stallions”.

Murphy said: “The one thing I see today, to be fair to the stallion owners, is that this has been recognised as a much more professional business. It’s not for the faint-hearted. The challenge is to have a stallion, and only a stallion, that’s going to attract custom. If he doesn’t attract custom he won’t put the foals on the ground. That’s the challenge.”

He believes that “any reasonable objective analysis” that eight out of 10 potential stallions will fail. “The Paretto principle applies here, the 80/20 principle, in that 20% will carry the whole thing. You could apply that simple metric here.” He also felt that the majority of breeders are “hobby to business breeders. Again you might say 20% of mare owners are totally business-orientated.”

CONFUSION

There was some confusion at the Irish Draught inspection day regarding a last-minute change to the loose jumping element. A total of 13 out of 14 owners had opted for this on their application form, with Danny Molloy, who had elected not to, informed the day before that the performance element was required at the Department of Agriculture’s instructions.

“You have to go back a little bit,” said Murphy, explaining the background of an option, which he felt was based on the need for genetic diversity within a rare breed and because “a significant number, 25% or thereabouts of the Irish Draught foals that are born are not eligible to come forward because of previous inspection protocols. In other words the sire and dams are not classified.”

“You can’t increase genetic diversity if it’s a closed book. You can do a pseudo thing where you bring in an appendix Irish Draught or thoroughbred and you widen the base a little bit. But let’s look at it in the purest sense. You can’t increase it but you can lose it and when you lose it, it’s lost forever.”

Murphy regarded the performance option proposal as a compromise solution for “someone who isn’t a performance-orientated man” with a stallion with potential to contribute to the breed.

“Don’t force him to go down that jumping chute if he doesn’t want to go down there. If the horse meets everything else, that’s what he is, Class 1, albeit he didn’t jump. And if somebody wants to show what their horse can do, that’s fine, he meets everything, plus he jumps.”

WORK IN PROGRESS

Regarding the 11th hour change, he replied that the “A or B option requires a lot of work. It then has to go to the Department of Agriculture to have the rules approved, updated and amended,” in addition to consulting with daughter societies. “You have to bring everybody into the family and say ‘look here’s what we’re trying to do’ because we are in danger of losing that genetic diversity.”

When asked if it would have been more prudent to have done this before introducing the new format, Murphy responded: “It’s the slow burn. Go back to November 2015 [when inspections were suspended]. Who would have thought that we’d be here in March 2017? We still haven’t got an absolutely clear vision, it’s still a work in progress.”

Addressing the divisions in the Irish Draught community since a divisive split in 2006, he called for lateral thinking for the way forward, saying: “There’s a huge amount and effort, and perhaps rightly so, into harmonisation with the daughter studbooks but there’s a level of disharmony at home in the mother studbook that shouldn’t be put under the carpet. That needs to be addressed.

“We have a situation now where there are breeders, and some of them have a long history of breeding Draughts, where unfortunately and very sadly some of those people are electing not to have their foals registered in the Irish Draught studbook. Maybe the solution is a pluralist approach?”

With the 2016 foal figures due to be released shortly, Murphy put the number of pure-bred Irish Draught foals as 700 “across the board”, while in recent years the number of Class 1 registered foals has averaged around 400.