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Originally Posted by parsixfarms
In recent years, we've seen high profile horses like Lure, A P Valentine, Saarland, Songster, and George Washington have fertility problems, and Lost in the Fog died of cancer. Are we implying, by logical extenstion, that Shug, Zito, Albertrani, O'Brien and Gilchrist aren't "hay, oats, and water" either?
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Precisionist was sterile or nearly so. If these stallions are sterile then why are others trained by the same men (especially O'Brien, those Coolmore horses breed like rabbits) showing similar problems. If a trainer was send horse after horse into the shed and they were proving sterile, I can understand looking for connections but none of those leading trainers has shown a trend, that I know of.
I'm not sure what the infertility rate of the breed is, and I'm not sure it could be determined. Since a significant percentage of males are gelded and I'm sure that some "unknowns" are retired, bred, prove sterile and return to the races with no fanfare. When the horse is Georg Washington or Cigar, it's a headline. When it's a non entity, he just shows up in the entries and no one is the wiser.