If a horseman can be sufficiently perceptive, the teachings of the past can determine the horseman's future successes. The arrogance of time prevents a horseman from having access to more than just brief and superficial learning from the body of surviving fragments of hard-won experience and knowledge, the combined and accumulated achievement and intelligence of history's best horsemen. But we cannot walk beside Edward Stanley, the 17th Lord Derby, while making his rounds with his trainer, George Lambton, Walter Alston, his bloodlines advisor, John Griffiths, his stud manager, his foreman, and the stable lads listening with rapt attention to the conversation. We cannot sit at the table in the tavern, during one of Tesio's visits to England, with Walter Alston, John Griffiths, Lord Derby, and Federico Tesio as they debated over drinks, the merits of a breeding theory or a new sire prospect or the latest broodmare prospect. We cannot ride on the ship with the great Australian theorist, Bruce Lowe, as he sails to Sacramento, California with a consignment of blooded horses bound for James Ben Ali Haggins' Rancho del Paso.
Past is prologue.
I thought that it might be useful to speculate and perhaps establish to a degree some of the motivations, state of knowledge, and the intellectual climate that shaped the thinking of Bruce Lowe. Throughout history, farmers have deliberately selected and crossed animals and plants in order to obtain higher-yielding forms, but little mention of their practical knowledge has been made in early literature. Selection of individuals or combinations of selection and crossing was pragmatic and agriculturalists were not too concerned with the ongoing debate over theory among biologists. The agriculturists based their practices on observation of variability of traits and their combination by crossing. Major social and economic impact of raising sheep in an agrarian society - wool, meat Sophisticated, widespread research into selective sheep breeding practices for meat and wool production and extensive progeny testing for empirical proof of performance was crucial and pervasive in an advanced, agrarian society.