Tales from Somerford: four super siblings from one ‘Fab’ mare
Pictured left to right: Cat Austen, Last Gift, Ashley Jenkins, Kensington, Josh Kehoe, His Highness, Dan Greenwood.
(Image credit: Jo Prestwich)
Getting your horse to the National Dressage Championships is an achievement, getting your homebred is even better – but how about getting four that you bred from the same mare?
Step forward Cat Austen whose mare Fahrenheydt had four of her offspring competing at Somerford. Je Suis Adiva was second in the para grade IV with Izzy Palmer, His Highness, 10th in the advanced medium gold with Ashley Jenkins, Last Gift, seventh in the four-year-olds with Ashley Jenkins, and last but not least, Kensington II with Dan Greenwood in the elementary gold.
Cat is more of a hobby breeder with a couple of mares alongside her job as an equine craniosacral therapist. She bought Fahrenheydt from the Romanno Stud when they were cutting down on numbers.
“It was in 2010 that I bought ‘Fab’ because I loved her bloodlines and she has given me four fantastic foals,” said Cat. “Her first foal, bred by Romanno Stud, Romanno Stromboli has competed to prix st george level and won the five-year-old Shearwater Championships.”
The first one Cat bred was His Highness, who was KWPN champion foal of his year, but sadly there are no more Fabs in the pipeline.
“We’d collected an embryo from her, implanted it in the recipient mare and that had gone well. Then I went out to the field a couple of days later and she’d died,” said Cat. “I was heartbroken, but wasn’t until a few weeks later that we knew the recipient mare had taken so Last Gift really is a last gift from Fab – she is so, so special to me.”
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