Stud: Adventures in Breeding

I never would have bought a book about thoroughbred breeding on my own, but a friend gave me Stud, and much to my surprise it turned out to be the best non-fiction book I've read in a long time. It fulfilled all the requirements of a "great read." It was interesting, funny and quite moving. Conley succeeds in giving each horse a distinctive and appealing personality so it's fun to read about these grand and sometimes frightening animals and the life they lead. His descriptions of the fabulous horse farms - big and small - make you want to stop what you're doing and fly to Kentucky or California immediately! Best of all, he takes you into the very select and rarified world of horse breeding - a world you would never even know existed before reading this book. His portraits of the patrician owners who have been breeding horses for generations as well as the oddball characters who work in the breeding barns is really fascinating and fun. The book includes a surprising amount of history - which Conley manages to make very fresh and interesting. His observations - whether about British royalty, ancient horse trading or the origins of the first Stud Book - are fascinating, and his writing is as elegant as the horses he admires so much.This book would make a great birthday or Father's Day gift for someone's special stud.

The text on the back cover of this book says it all: "The most expensive thirty seconds in sports." You will need a lot of pocket change plus a very good mare before you book a cover from Storm Cat, the Thoroughbred stallion with the world's most expensive stud fee---$500,000 per mare as of 2002. And there's no `payable when the foal stands and nurses' clause in his contract, either."Stud" is a two-year labor of love by "New Yorker" staff writer, Kevin Conley who became intrigued by the amount of money that a Thoroughbred stallion could earn after retiring from the racetrack. This is an exuberant, stylishly-written book that will tell you everything you wanted to know about what goes on in the breeding shed, but were afraid to ask.I also learned some things I didn't know I wanted to know, like the diameter of Seattle Slew's testicles---this is a book for horse-lovers who have already been through sex education class.The author spends some time at the Keeneland sales in Lexington, Kentucky, where the `Doobie Brothers' (four sheiks from the royal family of Dubai) duke it out with the `boys' (Ireland's Coolmore Stud) for the most expensive yearlings in the sale (often Storm Cat progeny). Conley doesn't neglect the smaller breeders who make a profit by buying and breeding inexpensive mares with good blood-lines, and then selling their yearlings and two-year-olds for a profit. (There is a story in last week's "Thoroughbred Times" about a filly "who clearly did not have enough pedigree to shoot for the stars," yet was sold for $1.9 million at Barretts March sale because she showed that she could run.)Finally, Conley details the differences between a `natural' cover (Thoroughbreds), artificial insemination (A.I.) techniques (Standardbreds), and pasture breeding (semi-feral Shetland ponies). Speaking for myself, I wouldn't exactly use the word `natural' after reading that it usually takes five or six people plus a stallion, plus a twitched and hobbled mare to complete the breeding process. Thoroughbred folks tend to be very conservative and have already rejected A.I. even though it is a safer, cheaper, and healthier method of getting mares in foal.

A lively and hilarious overview of a very weird subculture, the Kentucky farms where prize stallions retire to lives of compulsory, micro-managed promiscuity. Conley is great on the qwirks of pampered horses and humans alike. The book is really less about equine sex (it does answer certain invitable questions) and more about the incredible financial dealings that surround these animals. I was reminded at times of Michael Lewis' "Liars Poker", another great book about money-fueled nuttiness. Not particularly a horse or a financial person myself, but I couldn't put the book down.

Expanded from his article about the world's most expensive thoroughbred stud, Kevin Conley's "Stud: Adventures in Breeding" falls squarely in the tradition of great New Yorker prose non-fiction. Like the various collections of the work of his fellow New Yorker author, Joseph Mitchell, Conely's book is funny and fascinating, its language lovely and lively. It's filled with incredible facts (who knew mares had clitorises?) and sneaky-hilarious observations (like the cool but horny horse who resembles Miles Davis).The book is digressive in structure, using the stories of various thoroughbred studs (from the most expensive to the cut-rate) as springboards to examine other issues connected to horses: ... of a system to monitor the bloodlines of thoroughbreds. In the end, after all the astonishing descriptions of horsing coupling (lots of drugs, rubber gloves, and sexual surrogates), ... the sex act of horses and people deconstructs, and the book offers some fresh--and pretty profound--insights into a subject (sex) which has been done to death over the years.