Vive la France!

At last, a post about pedigrees!

It occurs to me that at some stage, I’m going to have used all the obvious place-related phrases as post titles for this blog. However, until then…

 I first became dimly aware of the Haras Nationaux (French National Stud network) by reading about it in the 1960s and 70s Riding magazines which were given me by an older friend and which I avidly digested during my childhood. In fact, my enthusiasm for horse breeding and pedigrees may well be largely traceable to those magazines, and I still have them in my loft. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to visit two branches of the Studs while on holiday in France, and I’ve also used their website for tracing pedigrees, and just for general browsing.

Now, I only visit the website every 6 months or so, and every time I do they appear to have changed it, so the following is not an exhaustive guide to how to use it now or in the future. However, there currently appear to be 3 main ways of finding information on individual horses on it.

The first is from this page ('espace etalons'), where you can search for all the stallions which the National Stud is currently standing, by breed. From the name of each individual, you can go to a page which gives more details including his pedigree and, often, a photo. The second is this page ('info chevaux'), which searches a much bigger database  known as the SIRE database. This includes stallions, mares and geldings, including some of unknown breed/parentage, many in private ownership as well as those owned by the Haras Nationaux, and some older/deceased horses. I think it may in fact include all those who are part of some kind of national microchipping scheme. The drawback here, of course, is that you need to know a horse’s name in order to get started. Also, if there are many horses of that name, there doesn't seem to be a way of refining the search unless you are a paying member of the site, so you have to trawl through them all. However, if you do find the horse you want, and it is a purebred, you can access several generations of pedigree from here.

The third method is from the homepage: click on the map showing the regions of France and it takes you to a page of information on the Haras locations within that region. This is very useful if you are planning to visit one of the studs, as it will give you all the relevant visiting details. If you select one of the locations listed as a Centre Technique (CTP), you can then access (bottom right of the page) a list of all the stallions currently standing there, as well as lists of stallions whose frozen or chilled semen is available. These latter lists are often a lot more extensive and so are another good way of finding horses. From each individual horse’s record on here, you can select to ‘en savoir encore plus sur sa généalogie’ and that will take you to a page giving not only a 3-generation pedigree, but also lists of the other produce of the horses in the pedigree, and a list of the stallion’s own produce. All this is a useful way to find individuals who might be used as parents.

Of course, I should have stated at the outset that you do need a smattering of French to find your way around, but once you get used to the vocabulary, it’s really not that difficult. A few useful basics are étalon (stallion), jument (mare, although they also seem to use femelle), hongre (gelding) and poulain (foal). Trait means draught, so a cheval de trait is a draught horse, while ane is a donkey. With regard to colours, noir, bai, brun and gris are fairly self-explanatory. Chestnut is alezan, and roan is rouanne, although I recently discovered that aubere can be chestnut roan (Gris rouanne is just grey – in the same way that grey TBs can still be registered as roan in the UK and US). Isabelle can be buckskin or dun,  also possibly palomino,. Crin lavées means flaxen, although be aware that in some breeds, for example the Comtois, alezan crin lavées (flaxen chestnut) can actually be silver bay, and bai crin lavées almost certainly is. I’ve also seen at least one instance of a brown horse being described as noir pangaré, while a black horse was bai foncé, so it does pay always to look at the picture if there is one!

Here’s one of the models I have pedigreed with the help of this site: 

 

whom I won as a MECS trophy in 2005. Prior to this, I already had a set of details for a chestnut roan Norman Cob stallion, Prince, given to me by Morgan Haberman of the US. This was a son of her stallion L’Inspecteur, who I believe was a bit of star on the US model scene in his day. Roan is a rare colour in Norman Cobs, in fact it may even have died out in the live horse population and you will not often find it listed as a possible colour on breed websites; but go back a bit and it’s possible to find real, registered examples who were listed as roan. I checked out Prince’s pedigree and his grand-dam is listed as roan, which is good enough for me.

Prince himself though was foaled in 1981 so was a bit too old to use as details for a showing model, so I decided to make my horse a son of his. I therefore needed a dam. While on holiday in 2004 I had visited the Haras du Pin in Normandy, and seen a few Norman Cobs including this handsome specimen, Herquemoulin:

 

(We saw him and I made a note of the name on his stable door just before we were shoo’ed outside – we were only supposed to be in the stables while on the official tour, apparently).  I looked him up on the Haras website and decided to use his dam, Tapette – she was bay, but I knew that she was capable of producing chestnut with a chestnut-based stallion. As she was foaled in 1985, she was plenty old enough to produce a foal older than Herquemoulin, so I decided to make my stallion a year older. Since virtually all French equines, of any breed, seem to use an alphabetical naming system, I needed a name beginning with G. A quick search through a French dictionary threw up the word ‘garance’ which means the colour of something dyed with madder. Madder is a pinky-red colour, so this seemed a perfect name for my horse!

Addressing realism for a moment, I admit that it’s hardly realistic that a mare belonging to a French stud would have been covered by a stallion in the UK imported from the US, when there are so many home-grown Norman Cobs in France to choose from. However, I didn’t see many other ways of finding a real Norman Cob mare, and one could always argue that the breeder sent her across the Channel or obtained some shipped semen in order to keep the rare roan colour going!

The second horse for which I used the site was this Percheron:

 

With his heavy build, long mane, and more feather than is seen on British or American examples, I thought he looked more like the French type of Percheron. Also he is greying out from black, so I wanted one of his parents to be black. As his sire I therefore chose Lime George, whom I had liked when I had seen him at the British Percheron Society Show a few years ago: 

 

Lime George was bred from two-imported French-bred horses, and I was able to use the Haras website to find several generations of pedigree for his dam, Cayenne. Unfortunately I have come to a halt with his sire, Bouton d’Or, as there is more than one registered Percheron stallion of this name, and I don’t know which one is Lime George’s sire!

My model also needed a dam, and for this I chose a real British Percheron mare called Hales Uni. She was pictured as a prize-winning filly in the catalogue of the Percheron Society breed show which I attended, and then a few years later I was delighted to see her on the cover of Heavy Horse World magazine as the supreme equine champion of the Royal Show 2004 – the first time a heavy horse had ever won this honour.  At that time Uni was nine and in foal for the first time, so there were a number of ‘free’ years to choose from for my stallion.

Uni’s dam was Hales Juno, most of whose pedigree I could trace from an earlier, 1980s show catalogue which I owned, or from the All Breed Database. Uni’s sire Ryan’s Day Granitdier (registered name Ryan Day’s Granitdier) eluded me for a long time, despite being an influential sire among British Percherons. Eventually however he also turned up on All Breed. As he was imported from Canada, my stallion, whom I named Hales Paulinus, has a nice mixture of French, Canadian and British lines.

I hope this has been a useful introduction to finding pedigrees for the French breeds, using a resource that you may not have known about. I’ll be happy to try and answer specific questions from anyone who contacts me.