Sacha Shaw’s breeding blog: jumping at the zoo

As I mentioned in my last blog, I do enjoy and follow other disciplines as well. Although my main interest is dressage, I work with a showjumping team and it was at our most recent show outing that I had chance to watch some very interesting young showjumping stallions first hand.

The show was held in Wagenfeld, at a zoo no less, but luckily the elephants were far enough away not to distract the horses.

Also competing were a number of young stallions from the state stud at Celle, and there was one in particular that caught my eye and I think is the sort of stallion many British breeders would use.

Inliner is a 2007 Hanoverian stallion by the Hamburg Derby winner Iberio out of a Sao Paulo mare. He had caught my eye at the start of the season on the Celle DVD as he looked a very attractive and neat stamp of a horse and I liked the way he used himself.

His sire line is one I am not familiar with at all, but does trace back to a Trakehner stallion called Ingo crossed onto Holstein blood.

The dam sire Sao Paulo is one I know a little better having seen more than one outstanding broodmare daughter by him and, as he is a horse bred by Paul Schockemohle, I see a lot of the blood of his ancestors (Sandro and Gepard) in horses I work with every day.

Back to Inliner himself, Celle note in their excellent stallion catalogue that he was a stallion that developed so well over the course of the performance test due to his great ridability, work ethic and intelligence. These attributes were clearly in evidence when I had the chance to see him in the flesh at the weekend.

He was placed second in two very competitive four-year-old classes, and confirmed my initial impressions as to his type and technique.

He is quite quick and fluid over his fences and, not being a very big horse, I could see him working well on mares being bred for the eventing field. He had a good walk and just looked like a super horse to deal with. He is certainly one I am going to watch very closely.

Besides being busy with the show season, I am also planning to get to some foal shows and auctions in the next month or two. It is always a superb opportunity to judge the influence of a sire, when you can see the type of mare being used and the foal she has produced.

I missed the very recent auction in Vechta where the first Totilas foal was auctioned and broke the 100,000 Euro barrier. But hopefully I’ll be able to report back on a few more over the summer.

Sacha

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