BloodHorse.com

Last month I harped about Thoroughbred sales companies' failure to update auction catalogs for the 21st century. Well, it's obvious that one auction house was already hard at work bringing some technological modernization to its catalogs.  (Or, in this case, ''catalogues.''  G'day, mate, and all.) The Inglis Bloodstock online listings ...

When possible, I plan for foals to be born in mid-March.  It's still fairly early in the season so they'll be good-sized yearlings, but by the middle of March we're usually out of the worst that Winter throws our way here in central Kentucky.  Until two years ago, I never gave too much thought to foaling complications.  I'd read ...

Our sister site, TheHorse.com, features a page of ads to locate homes for ''free'' Thooughbreds. Many are pleasure horses, some are show animals, and a few are mares worth consideration for breeding.  On that site today, I noticed a listing for the 1992 mare Lady Garthorn (pedigree).  ''Lady'' is a stakes-placed winner of ...

Reader question:  Mr. Gillies - I am just getting  interested in Thoroughbred breeding.  The more I read the more I became interested in rare Thoroughbred lines and out crossing.  I have been reading your blog and just love it.  I have a couple of questions, does it matter if a horse descends from a Northern Dancer say , ...

I don't like to pick one of the favorites for the Kentucky Derby.  I prefer to hone in on a well-bred longshot, and then to have my hopes and dreams dashed as my picks straggle in fourth or fifth... or nineteenth. But in recent years, I've had a feeling about a few horses. And I've almost felt guilty, because they were the ...

We're now two months away from Derby Day.  Here are a few of the runners I've been watching this year, hoping they'll make it to the Run for the Roses: Square Eddie (pedigree) is a spectacularly consistent colt. The Canadian-bred chestnut son of Smart Strike (SRO) has been in the money six times from seven starts, from 5 to 8.5 ...

I enjoyed a nice phone chat late last week with Chris Blake of Ascot Stud in Ontario, Canada.  I had called him to discuss the farm's unusual incentive plan for breeders, as part of my research for an upcoming issue of MarketWatch. He chatted with me for several minutes about the program, which actually pays the owners of ''solid, ...

I have a couple of ''rants'' left in me, but I think I'll hold off on any more of my promised snarkiness for a while. Before I start looking at pedigrees again (watch for my early Kentucky Derby picks soon, and a return of ''Is This a Broodmare?''), though, I wanted to address someone else's small ''rant'' in a comment from a previous ...

Two-year-old Thoroughbred horses are still foals in late winter and early spring.  Many aren't even fully two years old when they're entered in 2-year-olds in training sales.  And then worked faster than most will ever run again.  That's right, at this tender age, we expect our Thoroughbred foals to run a furlong in 10 ...

The Five-Cross Files has been around for a year now, making this the perfect time to take things full-circle.  We started out by exploring the pages of a sales catalog for ''revelations'' (Revelations of the Catalog Page, part I) -- and it seems appropriate to have ''part II'' of that discussion today. I'd originally planned a few ...