Aussie vs Shuttle

A Tweet on Monday querying the percentage of Australian bred sires considered commercial is a hard one to answer with absolute accuracy but a look at the Top 50 sires on the Australian General Sires List by earnings gives us a pretty good idea.

Of those 50 sires, only 10 have a suffix denoting that they were bred outside of Australia and one of those, So You Think is Kiwi bred.

Of the remaining nine, High Chaparral (IRE) and Street Cry (IRE) are dead, Lope de Vega (IRE), Medaglia D'Oro (USA), Hard Spun (USA) and Galileo (IRE) no longer shuttle, leaving just Teofilo (IRE), More Than Ready (USA) and Myboycharlie (IRE) as shuttle stallions available to Australian breeders this spring.

So what does this mean?

It means there are more Australian bred commercial sires, but if you look at their lineage you see the real impact of the shuttle sires as the majority of the Top 50 are direct Danehill line sires and many others carry Danehill through their female pedigree.

The Danehill phenomenon is what drives interest in shuttle stallions going forward.

Another Danehill will eventually come to Australia and nobody wants to miss out on that, so the big international farms keep rolling the dice and Australian breeders keep showing their support.

If you choose a shuttle stallion for your mare, you may well get in on the ground floor of something genuinely exciting, so don't let obvious facts at face value get in the way of an inspired gamble.