An old friend of mine was having some difficulties in his life and
made an appointment with a psychologist. I met him for coffee a few days
after his session and asked how it had gone.
“It was the weirdest thing,” he said. “I sat there and yammered on for
nearly an hour about all my troubles: ’If only my father hadn’t died
when I was seven, I could have...;’ ’If only I had stayed with the
sheriff’s department, I could have…;’ ‘If only I had made the military
my career, I could have….”
My friend took a sip of coffee. In response to my questioning look, he
said, “And the doctor said to me, ‘If only you were a giraffe, you could
have nibbled the succulent spring growth at the top of the tallest
trees.’”
Our world of the Appaloosa is fraught with the “If Only’s” and the
“Could have’s.” If only we knew the true history of the spotted horse...
If only we had definitive genetic information affordably and readily
available... If only every breeder were well educated in conformation. If
only the Native Americans had kept written records back in the 1700’s and
1800’s. If only there had never been an option to cross-breed… ...we could
have an Appaloosa breed... ...we could have 84-generation pedigrees...
...we could do designer horses like buying a new car—”bay with a blanket
and spots, please, with delivery in 11 months 11 days.”
But as with my friend, progress is made only when the focus is changed
from what didn’t happen in the past to the reality of today and the
potential for the future. Much as we might like to go into rewind and
change history, we cannot. Life doesn’t give us do-overs. This leaves us
with whatever it is we’ve got now, and the glorious opportunities for what
we can progressively create.
If this seems like a long haul—to take our good Appaloosas and further
concentrate the Appaloosa genes, studying performance and conformation and
color production to make wise breeding choices—it is a long haul. It’s a
slow process and, given that we are dealing with the unpredictability of
living creatures with a complex genetic make-up and fuzzy history, we’re
going to get surprises along the way.
There is no possible way to speed up the process of developing the
blood-breed Appaloosa. (What if we got 11 mares pregnant? Could we then
have a foal in one month?) The reality is that the breed can be built only
one generation at a time.
One positive aspect of the blood-breed “movement” is that the breeding
programs are small. We don’t have mass production of a lot of mediocre
horses with a few good ones rising to the surface. We are a grass-roots
movement focusing on producing quality over volume. Because most of us
have limited resources, we generally take extra care in our choices for
broodmares and stallions. Over the past ten years ICAA has witnessed a
strengthening of pedigrees and an overall improvement in the quality of
the foal crops. We boast some very fine young Appaloosas in our
registry—and they exist because of your efforts. (Okay, everyone gets a
gold star.)
As for the future—it’s an awesome idea, but I believe that ICAA is the
“history” of the blood-breed Appaloosa. Right now we are building the
documented history we wish the Appaloosas we began with had available.
Imagine, if you will, 50 years in the future, when F-14’s are commonplace,
when they are the “run-of-the-mill” Appaloosa. We’re not just on the
ground floor, we ARE the ground floor.
It’s a big responsibility we face, and in one way or another, we each
contribute to the preservation, development and growth of the Appaloosa as
a breed. But we don’t do so in a vacuum. If we are to make the most of the
available resources that exist in today’s world to build a beneficial
future, there must be both an element of cooperative co-existence and a
strong belief in the strengths of each of our breeding programs.
Nietzsche, who had a good sense of how reality works, said: “This is my
way. What is your way? THE way does not exist.”
We have the building blocks. We have the skills. We have a bright future.
And there’s not one giraffe among us. |