We Go Husband Shopping for Al

Last week (Feb 16-17, 2004), Judy, Debbie and I drove up to Bend, Oregon to look at Robbi Pruitt's stallions for suitability for breeding to my mare, Ali. Our plan was to leave at dawn on Monday, get to Bend in the late afternoon, check out the horses, have dinner and spend the night in Bend, then check out Caitlin's colt the next morning and head for home. All went according to plan to get to Robbi's ranch, except the weather was horrible - mostly rain and some snow all the way up both Hwy 5 and Hwy 97.

At that point, the plan fell apart completely. It turns out that Robbi is a passionate and tireless advocate for CMK arabs, so we ended up talking until dinner, bringing dinner back to the ranch, talking until bed time, spending the night at Robbi's, talking until breakfast, eating breakfast at Robbi's, talking until we went out to look at the horses in "full" daylight, then talking until we climbed into the van around noon. It's hard to put together the pictures to match the gist of the conversation, so I'm just going to intersperse pictures in the page - they are not necessarily tied to the story at that point.

The Players: On the left, Judy, Debbie and a Horse. Any horse. In this case, it's an elderly brood mare that is a key ingredient in Robbi's breeding program - the mare is the only representative of an important CMK cross and has thrown some beautiful foals. On the right, Robbi and Splash, her stallion with 5000 endurance miles on him.

No reason for suspense - Splash is the man (the photo on the left). He's a young stallion, he's done 5000 miles of endurance riding and he's been well-mannered through it all. He's got bone like a tank, but he's relatively small. My take is that Al is talented enough to supply agility and athleticism to any breeding, but she needs calmness and stoutness - Splash has both.

The bottom row of pictures is of Sawyer, her young stallion. Sawyer hasn't been put under saddle, yet - that will happen this Spring or Summer, but Robbi thinks he is a solid prospect to be her next "big" stallion. He has both the appearance and behavior she was looking for in Splash children. Sawyer has Argo as a grandfather, which should add some action to the mix - I have enough action with Al. Besides, although Sawyer is a beautiful horse to watch, he's unproven as a stallion.

Robbi let both stallions free to wander inside her indoor arena, which they did. Unfortunately, it was far too dark inside to get any pictures at all. That said, it was an awe inspiring experience - honestly - those guys are so powerful, it's breathtaking to watch them move. Very unlike Al, for example, who is so light she barely disturbs the grass.

Robbi also had a relatively new foal and five mares just about ready to foal. The object the mare is standing in is her feeder; Robbi throws hay into huge old tires and this mare wasn't afraid to go right into the tire after her dinner. There's a picture later of a yearling doing the same thing - they must be related, they are both chesnut, too. (That's a joke - at Casa de Pruitt, they're ALL chesnut.

The row below are pictures are of Robbi and her dogs feeding in the evening - whew, was that a cold experience, as you can see by looking Judy and Debbie. We tried to help, but only got in the way; Robbi has a System. I was really impressed with Robbi's ability to hay toss - the object in the air in the last picture is a flake of hay on its way to the dead center of the tire from over the fence; nothing but net.

We finally got to the herd of mares. Robbi had a story to tell about each of them, particularly the one with the white nose - she was the dam of a couple of the most promising young horses. There was only one bay; a three year old.


There were a couple of pens full of youngsters, but, to coin a phrase, "if you've seen one, you've seen them all." All kidding aside, do you see a pattern developing? One of the most interesting things that Robbi mentioned was that there is some evidence that color is one of many characteristics that frequently grouped together; that is, that, for example, the grey offspring of a stallion tend to be, in ways aside from color, very similar to other gray offspring of the stallion, but very different from bay offspring of the same stallion, and the bay offspring are similar to each other, but less so with the gray offspring. Whatever, Robbi's definitely got the high-white, chesnut thing going. As you can see, there was one bay (not Robbi's) and a potential gray in the entire bunch, all the rest are chesnut.