Sharif looking good
Young Sharif really is a looker. DeWayne Brown who owns his dam Pippa, visited the Doyle farm last weekend and took the pictures. You gotta love the Doyle motor on this Ma’naqi colt. And the black skin around the eyes. Terry Doyle is standing in the background.
He is indeed one of the most handsome colts I have seen.
He is a good-looking young fellow. Has the promise of being a powerful athlete as an adult, with that engine behind.
Mixing and matching various breeding groups makes for some seriously nice horses.
My mantra is simple: produce at least one replacement within the group and then bred the best to the best.
That’s just about where I’ve fallen with my breeding ethos, burgeoning as it is. There’s a certain responsibility to the breeding group that produced the horses I like so much, and they deserve a replacement for that caliber horse, but I don’t want to feel limited to breeding groups, because there are so many quality horses across so many spectrums of bloodlines and types.
The sight of such a good colt helps relieve the cramp even for someone like me, who was “raised” on Raswan’s theory.
Although I’ve always had an aversion to Maanaqi blood, it’s interesting that I thought of the accumulation of Nazeer as a “necessary evil” in all pedigrees as natural, acceptable. If I guess correctly, there are quite a few of us, although Nazeer’s father, the great Mansour, also carried this blood through his mother.
The analysis of Sharif’s pedigree could be a separate chapter.
We can see many interesting horses among the ancestors.
He has every chance to do so, and I wish that even at the age of 3 we could say the same good things about him as we do now.
Best wishes,
László
The second photo shows Pippa passing our test for good balance. She has dropped her head to graze, without spreading her front legs apart, like a foal. We had a friend, a retired coal miner, sadly no longer with us, who taught us this, When he walked in the pasture, he had whole corn kernels in his pocket. He would drop some and watch how a horse picked them up. We didn’t start carrying corn kernels, but we learned to watch for that specific point.
I admit to having looked at these pictures for an ungodly amount of time. So much to love in the biomechanical sense. That natural balance, that suppleness and stretch. You sense that he has unusual control over each hoof, fluent in all axes of motion easily. What a star this young colt could be. He is preeminent.
I agree.
I agree with both of you. I’m still very green here, but it made me think of this: you may need to plant more trees to replace the one you fell, but only a fool would ignore the strongest materials when making his tools.
This was meant to go under Moira’s reply…