by Dr. Bo Brock
I stood there looking at him over the back of that stud horse wondering if he was kidding or really thought that could happen.
Not everyone sees the world the same and some people have misconceptions of what might happen in certain situations, but this question moved to the front of the list of – “do people really think that way?”
The question surfaced at the end of a detailed story about his stud horse “Pappy Can Run”. With a name like that you would think that everyone would want to breed their mare to him, but it just wasn’t happening. Last year he could only get 8 mares booked to breed to ole’ “Pappy” and after long hours of consideration he had come with the answer as to why.
Seems that year before last Pappy bred 12 mares and 4 of them wound up aborting twins. As fate would have it, three of them eight bred last year aborted twins too. I have to admit that the odds of that happening are astronomical, but still, it was just bad luck.
There was no convincing him of that though, he had spent eight months contemplating the situation and had come up with a solution. How many ideas must have gone through that fellow’s head before he came up with this one? He must have spent countless hours wondering why no one wanted to breed to “Pappy” and then, once he decided on the reason, he must have spent days and days coming up with a solution on how to fix it.
The real reason was,,,,,,,, well, “Pappy” just wasn’t very good. He was a bit sway backed, kinda short in the pastern, a bit jug headed, bad slope in the shoulder, left front leg a might crooked, but most of all,,,,,he was slower than molasses. I guess that fellow just loved “Pappy” so much that he couldn’t see those short comings, so it had to be something else.
And that “something else” was the twinning problem. Yep, that had to be it. Since in this fellow’s eyes “Pappy” was the perfect specimen, it had to be that the owners of all the really fast mares were afraid Pappy was throwing too many twins.
He had arrived at a solution. Yes, he had deliberated endlessly on how to solve the twinning problem. What he came up with would have never crossed my mind but it was first on his list of things that would fix the twinning dilemma and get “Pappy” more mares to breed than he could handle.
The solution was found in the question. That’s right, the question held the simple answer that would make all future breedings to “Pappy” a guaranteed single live foal. So what did he ask me after all that big, long history on why no one wanted to breed to the famous stud horse “Pappy Can Run”?
“……. So Doc, don’t you think it would fix everything if we removed just ONE of his testicles?”
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