Frankel. Simon CooperЧитать онлайн книгу.

4

       Day 343

      You are probably asking yourself at this particular moment why the bloodstock industry goes to all this trouble of bringing horses together from all corners of the globe for a physical mating. As you will have gathered, it is a huge and expensive logistical jigsaw. Have they not heard of artificial insemination? If it is good enough for cows, pigs, polo ponies, sheep and just about any other animal or even bird you care to name, why not horses? For goodness sake, we humans have been at it since the London surgeon John Hunter carried out the first documented insemination and subsequent successful birth in the 1770s. As ever with all things horse racing, the answer is, all at once, that complex mixture of tradition, rules, money and hard science.

Tradition is the easy one to tick off. I like the fact that horse racing embraces tradition. Maybe furlongs are today only ever used in ploughing matches and on racecourses, but doesn’t that make it interesting and different? We like our conversations a little odd. Okay, when you say, ‘I got 6–4 about that horse’ a little mental agility is required, but it slips off the tongue better than any metricised 1.5–1. Of course, we could take the bulldozers to the switchback Derby course at Epsom to reduce it to a perfectly flat and uniform oval, but where would be the unique test of the racehorse in that?

      If you are thinking, well, I don’t give a damn about tradition, I’m going to be progressive about all this in embracing modern science, then you will find your foal forever excluded from thoroughbred horse racing around the globe which requires all horses to be registered in the General Stud Book. The wording is definitive: ‘Any foal resulting from or produced by the processes of Artificial Insemination, Embryo Transfer or Transplant, Cloning or any other form of genetic manipulation not herein specified, shall not be eligible for registration in The General Stud Book.’ That closes the door on anything produced other than by what the rules call ‘natural service’, as we just witnessed between Galileo and Kind.

      Then, of course, there is the money thing. The most productive bulls are inseminating over fifty thousand cows a year each. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize-winning economist to work out the supply and demand implications. Not only would there be a flight to a very few top stallions (only 95,000 thoroughbreds are registered worldwide each year) but the market would entirely collapse for everyone else. It is no exaggeration in saying that thousands of stallions would cease to be. Nobody would want them in physical or test-tube form.

      But aside from the money, the flight to a very few stallions would be a slow-burning disaster for the thoroughbred breed. Interbreeding, in horses and animals or even people for that matter (think The Madness of King George), eventually causes the bad, or more correctly recessive, genes to crowd out the good. Within a matter of generations, fewer and fewer foals would reach the racecourse as birth abnormalities became more commonplace. The racehorse as we know it – lithe, fit and fast – that began with those Arabian stallions all those centuries ago, would soon cease to be.

On something of a tangent you might be wondering, as I did, why those recessive genes haven’t taken hold in cattle. Fifty thousand sounds like an awful lot of offspring. Well, it is and it isn’t. There are currently 1.5 billion head of cattle on the planet (the most are in Brazil at 210 million, in case you ask). So, Galileo is fathering about one in 325 of the worldwide crop of foals each year, whereas Toystory, the most productive bull in history with roughly 500,000 calves to his name in nine years (he died in 2014), was producing a ‘mere’ one in 6,000 annually.

      An in-foal Kind returned to a different Banstead Manor Stud than the one she had left. Two months on from the bleak of February, spring had come to the Suffolk countryside. The beech trees were in vivid green leaf. Birds were nesting among the hedges that separate the paddocks. The farm tractor was rolling the fields, the broad striped grass adding a certain gaiety to the morning turn out. Kind was paired with Prove in the Blackthorn paddock, a more experienced mare who had raced in France, the two mothers-in-arms with foals to care for inside and out.

      Kind had stayed at Coolmore for a while subsequent to her time with Galileo. Two weeks after her covering she was confirmed as pregnant by a scan, an ultrasound that creates that same fuzzy black-and-white photo expectant parents hang on the fridge door. The egg, a single cell about the size of a grain of sand when fertilised by that one spermatozoon, was already multiplying rapidly by division, having spent a restless two weeks in the womb, moving around, until finally fixing itself in one of the horns of the uterus at the end of that first fortnight. A week later, the first heartbeat was detectable.

By the time she had her third scan two further weeks later the miniature foal was visible in outline. Seven weeks after covering, a manual inspection by the vet confirmed all was well. The yolk sac that had sustained the embryo had shrivelled away, the umbilical cord formed, tethering foal to mother. Now was time for Kind, Bullet Train and an embryonic nine-gram Frankel to head for home.

      The Victorians liked to term pregnancy as a period of ‘confinement’, as if all activity was to be kept to a bare minimum – if that was the case it certainly didn’t apply to Kind. Or even her kind. Not all broodmares are retired racers – some are still in training, racing for the first third of their gestation. That will be for potentially as long as 100 days, as full term for a horse is generally regarded to be around 340 days or 11 months. And that time was to be spent largely unconfined.

      I imagined that the Juddmonte mares, with their valuable cargoes, would be kept in light, airy boxes monitored 24–7 by both people and science. After all, one in five pregnancies don’t end with a live foal. Should there be twins (a rarity in itself at 2.5 per cent of all pregnancies) the chances are grim, with only one in six resulting in the live birth of both foals. But for all the attendant risks, my imagination is way off-beam; Kind and Bullet Train live the life outdoors, in the quiet paddocks that stretch away and out into the far corners of the stud. They are not alone. The Banstead Manor team group-up mares and foals at similar points in their respective lives. It is part social – horses like it that way. If you ever catch a glimpse of the wild ponies on the heather heaths of the New Forest, you will see a similar thing as the herd divides into groups, grazing together with the immediate companions defined by age and disposition. It is also practical; pregnant mares are the adult group most susceptible to infection.

It is hard to make the life of Kind and Bullet Train complicated. It is also hard not to think of it as idyllic as the spring became summer. Long, warm days spent cropping grass. Dozing in the shade. The foals gradually finding their independence. If they want to run, they run. If they want to roll, they roll. Nuzzling. Suckling. Little foals doing that strange hoppy, skippy leap as they run forward and then jump, spring-like, all four feet simultaneously in mid-air before bouncing back down onto the ground. Mother and foal do quite precisely whatever their nature tells them to do. They spend nearly all their time outside; close to twenty-two hours a day. It is a routine that doesn’t change, regardless of the season or the weather. There is no shelter as such, simply high corner panels in each paddock and tree lines that provide protection in the lee of any wind.

      Each morning they wait by the gate, not for the dawn but for food. Breakfast is the highlight of the day, followed by a couple of hours in the stable. A chance for the broodmare team to handle the foals. Check on their physical development. Pick up their feet. Trim their hooves. Adjust the collar to a growing head. This is the time to cement that physical bond between