This was my father’s answer when I asked him why he was about to purchase a beautiful, authentic desert-bred mare that was not registered in any studbook. There was something idealistic and foolish — these two tend to overlap — about his stance which left a mark on the teenager I was. No formal authority at the time was ever going to recognize the purebred status of this beauty. Her resale value and that of her offspring were almost nil. Despite having given it a lot of thought over the years, I am still conflicted about registration. On one hand, one does not really need a formal registry to confirm the purebred status of a horse. Registries get their information from somewhere. That somewhere, in the case of this mare, was the spotless reputation and the word of the mare’s owner. Also, I reasoned, registries got it the other way around. The very definition of a “purebred” for most breeds is a horse entered in a registry. That includes WAHO’s famously circular definition of a purebred Arabian horse. Besides, registries around the world are full of horses proven not to be purebred. Heck, that is the rule more than it…