New Yorker journalist Kevin Conley - armed with curiosity, a liking for horses, few opinions and a terrific sense of humour - set out to investigate the deadly serious, high-risk business behind the calculated genetic engineering known as horse breeding, writes Eileen Battersby
Stud - Adventures in Breeding. By Kevin Conley. Bloomsbury. 208 pp, £16.99 sterling
The result is the funniest, most original and deceptively revealing study of human, rather than equine, behaviour you're likely to read.
As openly impressed with Storm Cat as is everyone else, Conley prepares to meet His Highness. "He has a smouldering dark patch between his eyes with a white diamond on it, and a sharp crescent moon over near his left nostril, a curious marking that makes him look moody and dangerously attractive . . . I raise my hand to the little white line that runs down his muzzle. As soon as I touch him, Storm Cat ends the interview and walks away." Conley is left to contemplate that this character "is laconic, even for a horse".
Sex and money are his themes, and profit is certainly the motivation behind most of the people Conley meets through his research. It is a trail which takes him to Kentucky, where pampered stallions get to date, albeit briefly, the fastest, best-bred and most attractive females. He also goes out West to California, and later again to a dirt ranch in New Mexico where matches are made between the mean and the hopeless.
In ways, as he points out, it is the world based on concepts Jane Austen would understand. Conley as voyeur-cum-open-eyed student is a good guide. As he is not an expert, there is nothing smug about his likable guy-in-the-street approach. He has a sympathy for the horses, particularly the mares, and sufficient candour to report what he sees without concealing his frequent jaw-dropping wonder at the cynics, dreamers, crazies and losers he encounters.
One horse, a son of Storm Cat, is interviewed through the powers of a psychic. Distinctive Cat is asked if he is conscious of being a special or privileged horse? To which he responds, "of course". Asked about life as a stud, Cat admits to enjoying a roll in the grass as well as "just dancing along and being petted. I like it all". I see . . .
Greed and obsession, more than unselfish love of horses, generates many of Conley's human interviewees. This book is not about riding horses, or even liking them, never mind romanticising them. It's not even about how well some of them did on the track. Storm Cat, for all his power and presence, had an abortive career. His early days were not impressive: "as a yearling he was smallish, long-haired, pot-bellied, with turned out knees that got him booted out of Kentucky's best auction". During one race, the Breeders' Cup, he was leading, and he should have won - but lost because, apparently, he became distracted. As a three-year-old, he missed all of his US Triple Crown races due to knee surgery. Back in training, he never regained form and retired. That would have been that until his first crop of colts and fillies began racing - and winning.
Winning - it's the thing that sends a red alert to breeders. Winning means money, interested parties began remembering how fast Storm Cat was, "how he took a competitive streak that bordered on the criminal and used it to overcome his natural unsoundness". By 1994, Tabasco Cat's US Triple Crown race performances proved his dad Storm Cat "had a calling" - as an expensive sire his millions would be made in the breeding shed, not the track.
When it comes to reporting the bizarre gamesmanship that dominates the sales in which the likes of Storm Cat, grandchild of Canadian sire Northern Dancer, really scores, Conley is hilarious. The Keeneland sales in Lexington, Kentucky invariably become, at the highest level of bidding, a battle between the sheikhs, headed by the crown prince of Dubai - the four Maktoums, known in Kentucky as the Doobie Brothers - and "the boys", the Irish represented by John Magnier and the super cool Demi O'Byrne of Coolmore Stud, "the world's largest stallion and racing outfit, with stud farms and training centres in Ireland, Australia and Kentucky". Investigative journalist that he is, Conley refers to Irish stud fees being tax exempt: "this advantage allows Coolmore to consolidate its hold on the best thoroughbred bloodlines . . ."
As an example of the "Doobie Brothers" versus "The Boys" rivalry in action, Conley describes a tussle over a Storm Cat colt "hip number 356" that ends with Coolmore securing the youngster at $6.8 million, the highest paid for a horse at auction since Seattle Dancer sold for $13.1 million in 1985.
One of the most engaging sequences in the book centres upon the great Seattle Slew, the only horse to have won the US Triple Crown while still undefeated, and the last surviving of the 11 to date to have achieved it.
He only lost three times in a 17-race career. Conley meets the horse of horses just as the old stallion, having recovered from daring emergency spinal fusion surgery, is preparing to return to the breeding shed. It is a wonderful portrait of an aged champion still maintaining his lofty presence.
Sadly, Seattle Slew died in May, aged 28, on the 25th anniversary of his 1977 Kentucky Derby victory - after Stud had gone to press. So a touch of sadness overshadows the chapter. But what a character, owned by a logger and a stewardess, he is "the workingman's Triple Crown winner", contrasted with the beautiful blueblood Secretariat, who had also done the hat trick, four years before the ordinary-looking dark brown Slew, who as a racer had "relied on dangerous bursts of speed, which he deployed like a pool hustler".
Unlike Secretariat, who never lost the habit of posing for the cameras, Seattle Slew "never pretended to be knowable" and terminated most approaches by showing his backside. Conley describes the veteran stallion's "Miles Davis cool". There is also a detailed description of the surgery he underwent at 26 years of age. Having survived all that, the old boy resumes work in the breeding shed where he is an artist with good manners and natural tenderness.
Conley's visit to Claiborne stud farm in Kentucky has a powerful nostalgia, as he visits the stallion cemetery where mighty legends, heroes such as Secretariat, his father Bold Ruler; Mr Prospector and Nijinsky are buried, as well as Princequillo, an Irish colt apparently shipped in a submarine to the US in 1940, and one of Seattle Slew's sons, Swale, who won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont in 1984, only to die of a heart attack eight days later.
"Studs make money and mares make babies," observes Conley, who makes a good pitch for the valuable brood mares as the less flashy but more important players. Although he concentrates on the drama and surreal glamour of thoroughbred breeding (which is choreographed along a definite rule, the stallion must be protected at all costs, therefore the mare is rubber booted, shackled and "twitched" either by her lip or her ear) Conley also looks at the artificial insemination methods that dominate the breeding of standardbreeds. Natural cover, bringing the mare to a stallion, is compulsory for thoroughbred registration. Artificial insemination is not permitted.
He also visits California, where horse are bred for the track - not, as in Kentucky, for the sales. Finally, we see ponies living in a herd in a 1,000-acre University of Pennsylvania controlled veterinary facility. There,harem life has been recreated. It is far more low key than the breeding shed, a bit like being married, concedes Conley.
Aside from the wry humour of Conley's observations and the flair for jaundiced one-liners demonstrated by several of the experts, as well as the unintentional comedy of macho breeding-shed conversation - "Hold on, sister", "Get up, son" - Stud is intelligent, stylish and thoughtful; it entertains, informs and even exposes the less acceptable aspects of the breeding industry. Conley's ease of narrative and command of his material is a triumph of tone. Most impressive of all is his feel for equine irony: what do these majestic creatures really make of the humans who control them?
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times