Connemara inspections are producing ponies that can’t jump, Irish breeder says in blunt book

Enough with the lies about the Connemara pony being a distinct breed of coarse white ponies that roamed the mountains of Ireland for centuries and were jumping machines.

Irish author and horseman Nicholas O’Hare laid bare the lies in his 2002 book, “The Modern Connemara: The Search for Performance.”

O’Hare described himself as a stallion owner, breeder, and user of Connemaras for more than 35 years.

He lived in Ireland and personally observed officials in the Connemara Pony Breeders Society (CPBS) use that Connemara myth to spin their marketing message to sell ponies. Don’t dismiss O’Hare’s words as you have so willingly blown off the words of this American journalist. O’Hare was there.

He said he put together his realistic book with the help of a lot of breeders, but it was difficult for him to write emotionally, seemingly because he felt guilty pulling back the curtain on the Connemara pony’s true origins when his goal was to help the breed improve.

Other lies that O’Hare debunked in this hard-to-find book include:

Lie No. 2: All Connemaras are great jumpers.

O’Hare argued most are not.

Lie No. 3: Ireland’s Connemara inspections are producing premium Connemaras that can perform in the open show world.

O’Hare said this is definitely not the case.

He said the majority of those running the CPBS have not come from a riding background.

Thus, he said, the society “has never sought out performance bloodlines of specific jumping ability. Those purebred and part-bred performers that did emerge were treated more as a welcome bonus rather than as pointers for a way forward, which would base its credentials on competitive athleticism. It was taken as an article of faith that, because the breed produced some outstanding jumpers, the Connemara pony itself was a natural jumping machine and that all ponies would qualify for this description. Sadly, however, this is not the case. Type and its perceived points and size have been the yardsticks of breed prowess.”

So what does the CPBS say is its mission on its website. It says it is “committed to support its members to establish the Connemara Pony as the world’s premier pony for sport and recreation through the provision of services of the highest standards of excellence, and to act in the best interests of its members and its affiliated societies throughout the world.”

How has the CPBS fallen so short of that statement?

O’Hare said the CPBS is “beset with division, much of which is down to personalities and hunger for power.”

The same hunger for power has existed in the American Connemara Pony Society, but ACPS officials have held onto their power for so long that the current ACPS represents more of an annual party for the longtime few officials rather than a serious organization that cares about serious Connemara matters at its meeting. These officials are not fending off newbies with different views. There are no newbies.

The 2020 meeting was canceled due to the pandemic, except for a video conference of the board. The 2019 meeting spent the bulk of its Saturday agenda, the main day of any meeting when attendees learn the most, having a party at the “ancestral plantation” in Virginia of one longtime official.

It’s an exclusive society for maybe 20 friends, not a Connemara pony society representing a country.

Membership is getting so low, it doesn’t represent the country anyway, and the total membership includes a lot of longtime life members who have walked away but are still counted.

O’Hare’s book mainly seeks for the CPBS to quit focusing on the physical features of the Connemara — as seen by its emphasis on in-hand classes and inspections based on appearance — and to start focusing on athletic ability, because great performance drives demand.

I would ask for the same in America.

I can’t count the number of times over the past half century in the horse industry that I have seen an owner who doesn’t ride (or rides poorly) decide to breed two horses that are both dead-sided and unpleasant to ride, but the owner doesn’t care because the owner is seeking only a certain look (coarse white pony with big-boned legs). Such a breeding results in a useless pet rock, sometimes a rank one, not a premier horse or pony for sport and recreation.

O’Hare said a lighter and more acceptable riding pony type did emerge in Ireland due to the influx of Thoroughbred blood, but there was a “rectification” attempt around the year 2000 to add more bone using plain and thick stallions, and it produced unsatisfactory results.

He said few Connemara ponies make the grade as true performers able to take on the best of other breeds in open competition.

When I ponied up $50 to obtain my copy of this book from the UK in August 2020, I wondered why it was out of print.

I could guess, but I don’t know for sure. It seems suspicious, doesn’t it?

O’Hare is a huge fan of the infusion of Thoroughbred lines in the Connemara breed, as am I.

I am quite sure the DNA of Thoroughbred Little Heaven — introduced to the breed by the CPBS in the 1940s and grandsire of our wonderful stallion and his sister — made our herd of Connemaras the exceptional athletes that they were. And I am proud of the fact that they were black, refined and beautiful. They were beautiful!!! Why would we be ashamed of that???

Just ONCE, I would love to see other American owners of Little Heaven bloodlines acknowledge that they benefited from Little Heaven’s genes, too.

Our horses were mostly bay and black, which are the perfect colors.

I will never again own a gray Connemara, promoted so heavily by all Connemara breed societies. My gray Connemara gelding has melanoma lumps all over now, including a golf-ball sized melanoma in his sheath, and skin cancer on his “equipment” that has to be dealt with continually. Graying horses (horses born darker that turn gray) have an 80 percent melanoma rate, with all tumors being metastatic, according to UC Davis researchers working on a melanoma study in Connemaras.

I expect nothing to change in Ireland. Below is the makeup of the CPBS council of 2018-2019, as shown on the CPBS website April 12, 2019, and recorded by the Wayback Machine. How do you change the minds of this group? And the background image behind that council photo — which loads before every page loads — is a string of gray Connemaras, again fostering the myth of cookie cutter Connemaras.

CPBS Council in a screengrab from the CPBS website, as recorded April 12, 2019, on the Wayback Machine.

So what do I want?

I want:

— A page on the ACPS website dedicated to the huge contributions of Thoroughbred stallions Watchspring, Little Heaven and Winter, as well as Arab stallion Naseel and his halfbred stallion son, Clonkeehan Auratum. They deserve to be honored, not buried. What exactly is the ACPS afraid of in recognizing the Connemara pony’s true bloodlines? USEF kicking it out? I don’t think USEF pulls the plug on the ACPS if it starts telling the truth about the outside lines used to improve the Connemara.

— An end to inspections, or discrimination, based on appearance.

— The American Connemara Pony Society to stop looking to a bunch of old, set-in-their-ways officials in Ireland for guidance.

— The ACPS to maintain a breed registry of ponies and horses in the U.S., tracking Connemaras based on their genes. The stud book should be discarded.

— The ACPS to make available online the database of the registry of Connemaras for all to search without a login requirement. Without that, we will be forced to continue to use allbreedpedigree.com (with its mistakes) and tephra.de.

As for that myth about the Connemara pony, the one used to promote Connemara, Ireland, as a tourist attraction, O’Hare opens his book with the myth: “The Connemara pony is an ancient breed entrapped for hundreds of years in the wildest region of the West of Ireland, retrieved by the endeavours of an enlightened few when it was on the verge of extinction, and surviving today not just on its native hills but throughout the world.”

And then O’Hare sets the record straight.

“It is true that there were ponies in the mountains, and descendants of these may have been included in the first inspections by the Connemara Pony Breeders Society in 1926, but the Connemara pony of today is a cocktail embracing the Thoroughbred, Arab, Welsh, and Irish Draught deliberately introduced by the Connemara Pony Breeders Society itself.

“The concept of the Connemara as a native pony breed has been carefully fostered over the years, but the pony of today has little of the hillside ponies of old in its genetic makeup. … Many of the ponies are tall and athletic because Thoroughbred blood has been a major influence on the breed.”

O’Hare said the CPBS stud book “has created the breed,” but it is “not a native breed in the sense that it consists of purebred stock descended unchanged from the originals. Far from it.”

As for using such myths to attract tourists as a way to support the Connemara economy, how’s that going in the pandemic?

According to the Irish Times in an article published Aug. 1, 2020, Connemara’s economy is 68 percent tourism, and COVID-19 has “removed the people.”

One retiree in Connemara was quoted as saying: “What we have is unsustainable. Hordes of people flying in and out of countries on holidays and burning up petrol. There has been a gross over-reliance on quantity.”

Here in America, we don’t rely on Connemara myths for our economy.

We rely on Connemara ponies to perform at horse shows so people want them.

It’s time the ACPS focuses on America, the country it serves, and cares about producing Connemara ponies and horses that will survive recessions, pandemics and climate change, with climate change being the existential hurdle that decides whether the Connemara pony continues at all.

A great jumping pony might be able to clear that hurdle. A pet rock will not.