Historical Notes
Written by Dan in 2013
My mother, Joan Cummings, first started taking yearlings to the sale in 1968 but missed the National Sale because the filly involved got some minor filling in a leg, it sold at the mixed sale a few months later. That wasn’t the best start but was certainly part of an essential learning curve. I’m not sure when Mum started calling herself Tuapeka Lodge but it was quite early and was the name she had been using for a small Romney Stud that she had. The National Yearling Sale as it was known then had started in 1954. I’m not sure how many yearling were catalogued but think it would have been around a hundred. The best of the yearling crop did not get taken to the sales at that time it was geared more towards yearlings that people did not want to keep. There were very few people who actually bred yearlings for the purpose of taking them to the sales.
Presentation of the yearling or the leader was probably more notable for the lack of it than anything else. If there was a pretty girl leading she generally got the auctioneer’s attention before the horse. The women’s movement knocked this on the head and perhaps the gradual improvement in overall presentation and professionalism also had something to do with it. “Best Presented” competitions were a feature for many years and were keenly contested. There was always a bit of jealousy and claims of bias in the judges, or skull-duggery from the agents, but it all served the purpose of lifting the standard. Today some yearlings might be considered overdone rather that underdone but it is always great to see somebody trying something a little different to make their yearling stand out from the rest. You hardly ever see a poor yearling at the sales now.
Artificial Insemination was still a long way off and a Stallion’s book was full at around one hundred. Like now there were always a few stallions that were at the top of the pile and they were hard to get into, perhaps there were more in that range then than now because of the limited numbers they could service. Johnny Globe must have been coming to the end of his term because I don’t remember us ever having one by him, but Garrison Hanover and Lumber Dream were two of the most popular. We used Lumber Dream before he really became popular and were lucky to get a filly or two by him in the early days which set the stud up well for the future.
Relationships with the various Stud Farms where stallions are standing have always been important and still are. This is not made easier by transported semen, even more so when it is frozen and the horse is on the other side of the world and there might be two or three studs involved as well as the farm where the mare is located. Mum and Dad used to take the mares to stud almost every time and pick them up again. It usually meant more than one trip to Christchurch each year in the old Bedford cattle truck. The mares are now served closer to home at Macca Lodge so we are on the farm several times a year, but visits to the studs whenever possible are still always enjoyable and well worth the effort.
While most seasons Tuapeka Lodge do support a new boy on the block for one or two of the matings most of the time it is the best stallion we can have access to. This has certainly been expensive over the years but must be part of the reason why our two main families have remained strong and current. There is nothing that could be considered a weak link in the pedigree of any of the mares and some that have not succeeded on the race track have gone on to become good broodmares for us or for others. In fact the two foundation mares, Mains Lady and Sakuntala, were both unsuccessful racehorses and could easily have been culled if they had been around today!
Culling in any breeding program is important but it is tricky. Size for instance is significant when you take a yearling to the sales, so the size of the mares is a factor when it comes to culling. But there is an old adage which says that “if they are good enough they will be big enough”. Neither Mains Lady nor Sakuntala would have made fifteen hands and their families have not tended to be large either. Monkey King fits that profile but Iraklis doesn’t. The mother of Monkey King was small and light and was sold at the yearling sales for $16,000, the previous year her half sister was sold at the sales for $180,000. There were pressures other than horse sense around in the financial markets at that time though.
Advertising has always been a part of the Tuapeka Lodge yearling round. Don’t know how the logo came to look the way it does but it slowly became established and logos seem to be important these days so we don’t tamper with it now. While buyers do examine a yearling up close for faults their most important view is from a little distance, they may not know exactly what it is that catches their eye but there is always something they like, or don’t like about the way a horse looks and moves. For that reason we started working with videos in the mid-eighties and the developments in that field have been enormous from the old VHS tapes to YouTube and the Internet. Even the development in quality of YouTube over the few years it has been in existence is breath taking. We bought a new camera recently to take advantage of HD so watch out for next year’s pictures - however they don’t seem to have a camera yet that will make horses actually run faster! Background is interesting: you tend to associate horse properties with post and rail fences, ours is a larger sheep farm so we try to take advantage of the space and avoid fences in the shots, it gives the impression of horses running free in a natural environment.
To finish I must mention the Southern Bred Southern Reared group that is working hard to emphasis the many advantages of raising horses in the South. Like the horses we are herd animals, we try to run faster than the others and squabble a bit at the feed bin, but we still work together and look out for each other. It is probably the same for the whole industry.
