Mares and value

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bare it all
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Wed Jun 12, 2019 12:01 pm

Question for those in the biz...

When you have a mare with value as breeding stock - is it better to never have raced her than to try her and have her be a low quality racer?
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Mylute
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Wed Jun 12, 2019 4:24 pm

I would say better to have raced her, because even if she never won (and as long as she didn't be a Zippy Chippy), she at least showed the gumption to be receptive to training and tried.

But really it all comes down to the individual mare and individual case. As always there's plenty of top race mares who produced diddly squat, but then their daughters produced some good ones, and so on.
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TBird
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Wed Jun 12, 2019 6:49 pm

The old saying goes "Better unraced than unplaced."

But a mare who is a winner (at any level) is--very generally speaking--more valuable than one who isn't. Which is why it's not uncommon to see big trainers shipping well bred, but untalented fillies to dinkie tracks in an attempt to break their maidens (without having to drop for a tag where they might lose them.)
Horsebagger
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Thu Jun 13, 2019 8:19 am

Mylute wrote: Wed Jun 12, 2019 4:24 pm I would say better to have raced her, because even if she never won (and as long as she didn't be a Zippy Chippy), she at least showed the gumption to be receptive to training and tried.

But really it all comes down to the individual mare and individual case. As always there's plenty of top race mares who produced diddly squat, but then their daughters produced some good ones, and so on.
I generally disagree. It's good for the dam of foals to have offspring that have raced, displaying at the least, a level of soundness in her foals, and then the question then gets asked/answered, what level of quality are each of the foals.

If you have a filly or mare who is unraced which you hope to breed, unraced is better than unplaced. Commercial breeding is about selling potential and 'hopes', and the more negative information you have on a foal's pedigree page in a sale, the more you go from hope to 'nope' in a potential buyer's eyes.

My .02
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