A Baby Boomer Gets on with Her Dream of Arabian Horses

Series starts here

After the long drawn out events of Lindsay's brain cancer, it took a while to get to a place financially that I even felt like I could look towards my dream. While I had continued to show Arabian horses all the way through this troubled time and had actually even shown Scandalous during a season, the breeding part of the dream had come to a standstill.

By the time I did finally decide I could think about breeding my first foal was a grown horse, a huge grown horse. He had matured to 16 hands and he was as sweet as a horse can be. I had no doubt in my mind the way to go was to return Scandalous to GS Khochise.

By then the beautiful black bay Arabian stallion was owned by Betty Chapman and was well on his way to amassing more championships that any other Arabian horse in history. While it was great to have the stallion gain all that notoriety, it also meant that his stud fee had gone up considerably.

I was, however, due to the quality of my mare and the horse produced by her mating to the Khemosabi son already, able to negotiate a package on the breeding fee. I agreed to purchase a number of breedings for the price I had paid originally. That made the cost more manageable.

So it was that in the spring of 1995 Scandalous went to visit GS Khochise. The Arabian mare began showing the minute she stepped off the horse trailer. Just the sound of Khochise's voice was enough for her.

Unfortunately, we didn't get her settled as easily as we had before. The stallion was breeding a lots of mares and the vet was doing a lot of palpating to see what mares he could hold off on breeding trying to stretch semen as far as possible. Scandalous's system just didn't take to all of that intervention.

By the time we finally did get the mare in foal, I had accrued a pretty hefty vet bill. Believe it or not, the charges were running over $1000 a cycle. It was the third cycle before we actually got the mare settled. My nerves were shot and so was my budget but at least we had a foal coming the following year.

In the meantime it was time to do some thinking. If it continued to be difficult getting the Arabian mare in foal, there was the possibility that I would not get a replacement for her. She had only had two foals and both of them were colts. While I had no plans to be standing a stallion, there was the possibility I would not get a filly out of this mare.

Early on I decided if the mare had a colt and it was stallion quality he would be kept intact until I knew for sure I had a filly to replace Scandalous. Little did I know how prophetic these notions were.

To be continued.............


Part 2


Arabian horse Arabian horses horses horse Khemosabi horse breeding