Thanks for all your comments on "To Breed or Not to Breed?" Breeding a nice mare to a nice stallion and wanting to keep the offspring (assuming said offspring lives, etc.) in spite of what Fugly says has many benefits, ranging from just plain fun to learning about life to, as MiKael pointed out, being allowed to follow your dream. Is there anything more important than that?
So, I called my niece, the horse vet, for professional advice on what to do next and her opinion on the whole project. If I was hoping for an endorsement, perhaps I should have called someone else.
"Oh, Anne! You DON'T want to do that," she said. Her passionate, unequivocally negative response surprised me.
"I don't?" I said, shocked and disappointed.
"Absolutely not. I've seen so many bad horses that were raised by mother-daughter owners. Some of the worst horses I deal with. Not that you and Lily would necessarily ruin the horse, maybe if you had good professional help you wouldn't, but horses raised as pets in the yard usually don't understand that they are horses," she said. "If it's a male you could geld it and cut off some of those problems, but you'd still have to discipline yourselves to treating it like a horse."
Now, she loves me and knows me. On the plus side, this reaction means she thinks that I'm basically a kind (pushover) person whose existing horses are pets but were, fortunately, raised by someone else. So I'm not insulted even if I am shocked. I do indulge my animals, husband and daughter. And myself. (I'm working on denying myself chocolate.)
But I'd never thought about this pitfall before. "You'd need to treat the foal like a horse, treat it like its mother treats it. Train it and ignore it," she said. But it's so cute! How could we do that? I guess that's her point.
So I said, "What if we got professional help and didn't ruin the horse?" So we talked about who could help us, how it should be done, the perils of pregnancy and birth and the heartbreak that can happen. We talked about the expense and the stallions under consideration.
She said, "I don't think you or Lily could handle it if something went wrong. Bad wrong." She's the one I called when the hamster needed to be euthanized. She's the one who's seen us at our crazy worst with our pets. She has a point. But we're several dead cats and hamsters under the bridge, so to speak. And isn't this part of the learning process about following your dreams? That sometimes bad things happen and you have to take a detour, redirect, redream and try again another way? So I got her to go along with that.
But then we got to the thing that's probably going to stop me. Lily is 13. If we breed Lucy tomorrow and she foals next year, Lily will be 19 before she can start jumping the foal and really using him/her.
Sure, at 19 Lily could still be riding like a fiend and could somehow win enough scholarships to afford to go to college AND take a horse. But there's so much important in life that needs attention at that age. School, college decisions, boys, a social life. Will she still be my horse-loving girl? And if not.....? I guess we could sell the horse. But this isn't part of this dream.
Lily and I discussed the timing of all this, the foal's age and development and while she believes she will be riding and competing at Rolex in the near future -- and I hope she will but think her schedule is too optimistic by a decade or more and is certainly out of our budget -- she understood that she her goals and the foal's maturation rate don't coincide. Yes, she can be riding and training the baby before it's five, but she can't really be asking for hard physical work.
More thinking to come, but that's today's state of mind.
She hasn't done all that Buddy can do. Or Lucy, either. I think I'm going to get her to sit down with one of her former trainers who competed at Radnor with an affordable QH and understands dreams and finances. Maybe if we set goals for this year, and next year, etc. Lily is a talented, dedicated rider, but doesn't know quite as much as she thinks she does.
This is tough and I don't want her life lesson about horses to be that it's all about the money. I want it to be that if your dream is big enough, you'll find a way.