Another battle brewing over breed standards and inspections

Frustration over breed standards appears to be building, based on feedback I’m getting from around the world, and I was sent an interesting article on the topic that was published in the June 2012 issue of Ireland’s Horse Review, a monthly sport horse newspaper.

The article says the board of the Irish Draught Horse Society of North America has suspended registration reciprocity with its counterpart, Horse Sport Ireland, over changes made by Horse Sport Ireland that were put in place after the reciprocity agreement was made.

If I understand the situation correctly, Ireland altered its inspection scoring and added in an X-ray component, then required re-inspection and classification of stallions already approved as Registered Irish Draught, or RID.

To which the U.S. officials said: “We no longer share a common terminology or inspection process.”

U.S. officials went on to say, “Serious consideration must be given to the impact upon our current members, their horses and our established RID-classified horses of reciprocity when currently it is unclear whether reciprocity is going to be given by those foreign registries, particularly Ireland.”

The U.S. society said: “In our minds, every RID in the United States should be granted Class 1 status.”

The writer of the article concludes: “It appears this this latest installment in the long-running Irish draught organization’s saga is a hangover from the opposition previously expressed by some elements of the ID world to the HSI taking on the role of studbook keeper and organizing the inspection and classification process.”

There’s a lot of irony in the fact that U.S. breed officials who are in the business of judging and discriminating against horses based on their looks according to subjective and arbitrary criteria are now crying fowl when the rules of another organization don’t suit them. U.S. officials no doubt have angered many a horse owner over how they run their inspections, and now these same officials don’t like the way decisions in Ireland affect them.

But I give the U.S. draught group credit for at least standing up to Ireland. I have no such hope for the Connemara society in America. I’ve always noted a sort of awe in U.S. Connemara officials over the Irish inspectors who were coming to America to show us how inspections were supposed to be done. Basically, to be blunt, it appeared the Irish inspectors were cute and had an accent. Attractive? Sure. But you don’t go changing the rules of an entire breed to conform to more stringent rules in Ireland so you can flirt.

Horses’ futures are at stake in this process. Setting breed standards is not a game. It’s not a hobby. These decisions involve living, breathing animals, and their genes should not be at the mercy of a group of hobbyists and animal lovers who have many hidden agendas as they sit in a board meeting and write down nonsense standards on paper. No one in the room making decisions on breed standards really has any business even discussing what should be considered good genes. If officials want us to think otherwise, they can show us their Ph.D. in genetics.