So Friday, before Eight Belles's terrible fate at the Derby, the Wall Street Journal had an article about the pervasive influence of Native Dancer's bloodlines in modern, top-class horse racing.
Native Dancer won everything in sight in 1953, and 1954 before he was retired at age 4 because of, you guessed it, injury-proneness in his feet. (He was also descended from the brilliant but completely unmanageable Hastings, most famous as a great-great-grandsire of Seabuscuit, but also known for stomping a groomsman to death.)
But that success has led breeders to mate Native Dancer's progeny so often that the thoroughbred gene pool has shrunk. And as it shrinks, another trait of the Native Dancer line is becoming more pronounced.
Like hemophilia in the Russian royal family, Native Dancer's line has a tragic flaw. Thanks in part to heavily muscled legs and a violent, herky-jerky running style, Native Dancer and his descendants have had trouble with their feet. Injuries have cut short the careers of several of his most famous kin, most notably Barbaro, a great-great-great-grandson who was injured during the Preakness Stakes and was later put to death.
Overbreeding has exacerbated the problem. "There's a lack of durability right now," says Ric Waldman, the former head of operations for Windfields Farm in Canada, which has bred and raced Native Dancer's descendants.
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Some believe the success of this line, coupled with the boom in the breeding market, has come with a price. The risk of injury and the prospect of guaranteed millions in the breeding shed have taken many great horses out of the sport at a young age. That's left fewer veteran stars to lure fans to the track.
It's also what happens when a sport's top-level success becomes disconnected from its farm system, so to speak. Eight Belles was, and Big Brown is, descended from Native Dancer, Big Brown on both his sire's and his dam's sides. (The WSJ has also provided a pedigree chart, showing the links back to Native Dancer, and to the other main Royal bloodline, Nasrullah's, which produced Secretariat and Seattle Slew.)
The good news is that breeders are starting to look to foreign bloodlines; interbreeding with them may make horses more robust. The bad news is that it's likely only to be a temporary infusion, until the flaws in whatever new royalty emerges become apparent.
There's also an argument for genetic engineering in crops here. Continued experimentation is the only way to make sure that a crop with a specific weakness, that hasn't manifested itself yet, can be quickly replaced with another, less-vulnerable crop. We live in a world market for seed now, like it or not, and we need to be encouraging, not discouraging, experimentation.
