By Sabine Timman
Photography: Sabine Timman, Kim Lundin, and private collection

The participants at the recent eventing World Championship in Pratoni del Vivaro, Italy, included one horse registered to the Dutch NRPS studbook. Shutterflyke is by the very well known Sir Shutterfly, with Kigali as her damsire – a horse that won the WBCYH showjumping championship in Lanaken as a seven-year-old, but then progressed to dressage GP fame.

It was no accident that Shutteflyke was competing at such a high level in eventing, so it was interesting to dive into her story.
Shutterflyke has been competing with Miroslav Trunda of the Czech Republic since 2017 when she was six years old. Trunda started her in young horse classes, and concluded that first year with the eventing World Breeding Championship for Young Horses in Le Lion d’Angers where they finished eighth. This result was only the beginning for the are who turned 11 this year. Last year they recorded a creditable 39th at the Tokyo Olympic Games, and appeared on the entry list for the Pratoni World Championship.

Horses without papers

Shutterflyke was bred by Sipke Bijzitter and his niece Marieke de Roos-Kerkhof, and is a product from the special damline of Sipke on which Bijzitter has been basing his breeding for many years. He began, just like other older breeders – Sipke is already 82 years old – at a time when horses were still working the land: “We had a farm at home and, at that time, there were no tractors so we used the horses for work. When one got a bit older, we sometimes bred a foal or bought a new horse. A few times we bought a horse with good papers, but they always turned out to be less useful than the non-studbook horses that we had ourselves. At that time, studbook papers were not very important. A lot of the working horses had no papers and no one ever asked about it. Only when more inspections came and tractors took over the work of the horses did papers become more important.
“At that time, it was around 50 years ago, I had Ikarla, an easy but quick mare. I had bought her mother, a black blaze mare without papers and matched her with the stallion Ziezo, but I had no proof of that. Because the parents were unknown to the studbook, you could register your horse with the ‘helping’ studbook at that time.”.. To read the complete article you need to be a subscriber
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