By Jean Llewellyn
Graphics: Gemma Alexander
Breeding News for Sport Horses recently published the 16th edition of its Worldwide Sport Horse Stallion Directory – updated and with over 9,000 stallion entries in the online database. Our database is unique in that stallions may only be entered if they are ‘living’, and licensed/ approved by a member studbook of the WBFSH.
It is a massive undertaking every year to collate up-to-date information, as we know it, and to cross-reference the stallion entries with a database of ‘contacts’ – but our quest to offer this valuable tool to breeders began in 2005 and has been published annually ever since.
Naturally, it’s been a great source of pride and this year, having produced the various tables, I wondered how we might amalgamate and index all the information to hand, and create a super-stallion ranking list. Thankfully, I turned to Gemma Alexander, a master statistician who has provided all the graphics for Christopher Hector’s analyses. I sent her the various tables from the Stallion Directory, and asked whether it would be possible create a formula, based on the year-end results for the various disciplines, that could thenbe translated into illustrative graphs. The answer was, of course, ‘yes’!
Naturally, the results will speak for themselves, and include stallions by discipline, and stallions across all the disciplines. However, it should first be explained that eventing has been, and will continue to be something of an anomaly because the number of stallions in competition is so small, yet the volume of sires for eventing overall is quite huge. We also discovered that when the WBFSH year-end ranking was published (from data supplied by the FEI), fewer than 30% of the horses listed as ‘male’ or ‘stallion’ were, in fact, still entire. This, in itself, was a major task as many of the online databases rely on FEI or WBFSH information, and it was only be contacting many of riders themselves that the true picture emerged and the number of castrations increased!.. To read the complete article you need to be a subscriber
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