I’m pretty sure the #1 reason for the live cover rule is to reduce the number of progeny by any one stallion.
To my knowledge the Jockey Club still accepted Anglo-Arabs (Arabian x Thoroughbred crosses) until 1943.
In some US States, the laws passed to legalize parimutual betting on horse races specified the breeds allowed. So you would not be able to hold races with other breeds (or unregistered horses). At least, you wouldn’t be able to allow betting on such races, which makes them economically non-viable.
This.
While the OP’s question has been accurately answered by the various posts on the rules, the serious desire to clone race horses is pretty far in the future. The current state of cloning still tends to result in degraded DNA in which the child is susceptible to disadvantageous mutations.
Not really, it is to reduce the number of offspring produced. Read back that addition of new bloodlines is scarce, if at all allowed, and inbreeding can be a concern. Inbreeding is increased in AI.
Also, in species that use AI, it’s not as if it is all willy-nilly. The sires that provide the semen are known and have had their geneaology traced back. For example, a dairy cattle sire may be son of Bull X that sired 1000s of high producing cows and of Cow Z, the prized cow that is the best and most high producing cow Happy Farms has produced in the last 10 years. So even if he is starting, he is starting with a good record. Then years later they may find his full “sister” is also a high producer and that all his daughters are also high milk producers, thus increasing the value even more.
And to provide inbreeding is serious, turns out one of those prized bulls was carrying a mutation that, due to his status, was able to be passed on to multiple generations. When they started creating homozygous pairs (granddaughters/grandfather, father/daughter for example), they discovered the mutation, and were able to trace back the problem.
It’s a similar situation in greyhound racing. They’ve been using AI for a couple decades now, and when dogs become champions, they start freezing their sperm. Now we have some very famous sires, long dead, still producing offspring. When you explore the bloodlines (they’re in an online database), you can see that some of these champions have produced 2000 - 3000 litters!
I think they’re backing down from that practice now that the bloodlines are getting thin, and the veterinary research community have proven a hereditary correlation to osteosarcoma. (Greyhounds aren’t bred for conformation, only function, so they are generally super healthy. They do, however, have ridiculously high chance of dying from osteosarcoma. The vets have found a correlation to specific champion sires, one of the most famous is a dog called Dodgem by Design.) It’s possible that by now they’ve also proven to themselves that those hall of fame champions aren’t as easily replaced as just breeding them together. It’s fairly rare that championship performance persists more than two or three generations - and when it happens it’s one or two hounds out of several thousand.
I know nothing about race horses, but it would seem to me this is an ex-post rationalisation. In case of an artificially inseminated horse, the buyer could still assess a horse on the basis of sire and dam. It’s just that sire and dam didn’t mate naturally, but that does not affect the genome of the offspring. Similar to a clone, where the buyer could assess the offspring either on the basis of the horse of which it is a clone, or that horse’s lineage.
I misread that as 2000 - 3000 litres. :eek:
Well, it appears that cloned polo ponies (entirely legal, it appears) are starting to do rather well:
The no artificial insemination rule is because the industry wants to prevent itself from the massive fraud that results when someone sticks a dud stud’s semen in the tube that’s labelled for a great stud. Owners will pay more in stud fees for great studs. A lot more. If just anyone can sell something with a horse’s name on it, but it
s a dud inside, that leads to massive fraud.
Heck, what’s with thinking it won’t happen with horses, it’s happened to HUMANS!
Horse porn?
It’s only porn if it’s recorded for later re-watching.
I can see that, but surely there are means to verify whether the parents of an artifically conceived horse are those who the seller claims they are. The whole thing sounds to me like an attempt to find a pretext and an ex post rationalisation for a protectionist clause which, in truth, is intended to restrict supply top the benefit of those who have an interest in restricted supply.
There are means, but they are more expensive, and also subject to fraud. They require either a blood sample or a hair follicle from the foal, and what’s to stop an unscrupulous breeder from sending in a false sample?
But the main reason is that mentioned by JcWoman – the worry about possible narrowed genetic diversity in the breed from AI.
Using AI, you can separate the semen from a champion stallion into dozens of ‘straws’, each one of those can be used to breed a mare. Anc you can collect semen from that stallion daily. So AI makes it possible for anyone to breed their mare to a champion stallion. Then so many do this that soon a majority of the foals are from that bloodline – this tends to lead to bad recessive traits becoming visible, and affecting many of the breed’s foal crop.
This has already happened with the Quarter Horse breed, where they have had to resort to draconian measures to try to end the HYPP disease – castrating all stallions from specific bloodlines, and refusing to register foals from mares of that bloodline. And it’s been a big controversy, because of the financial loss to people who bought those horses unknowingly.