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The mares arrive for their appointments by horse van and walk over a gravel loading dock into the receiving barn -- a sort of greenroom for mares in estrus. When a mare enters, somebody pushes a button, a window opens, and Cooperstown, an Overbrook teaser stallion, sticks his head in to try his luck, nuzzling her flank and nosing her haunches. If she kicks, he’s the one she kicks at, not Storm Cat [a 17-year-old stallion whose stud fee is $300,000]. (“If they don’t make it at the track, they end up being teasers,” Doc Yocum says. “So it’s a little incentive deal.”) In the past twenty years, veterinarians have grown very precise in pinpointing ovulation (an increase in accuracy that has allowed stallions to double their workload -- and farms to double their profits -- since fewer and fewer mares require follow-up visits), but final verification is still left to the teaser stallion. If there are any doubts about her receptivity after Cooperstown’s initial interview, he is forced to try a jump himself -- wearing a leather butcher’s apron to insure that the dry run goes unconsummated. Usually, though, she’s willing., the window shuts for Coop, and the mare is led into a padded chute to be washed for the breeding shed.
Just before Storm Cat’s mare is ready, his groom, Filemon Martinez, a quiet man with a Clark Gable mustache, walks the sire of sires across a covered bridge over Hickman Creek to the stallion barn. From the doorway of the barn, where Storm Cat and Martinez wait like actors in the wings, you can hear the business of breeding: “Easy, boss,” and “Go, buddy,” and, if it’s a stallion with problems in the Valentino department, the pacesetting shouts of “Hyup! Hyup! Hyup!” Most do just fine in the breeding shed, although farm policy seems to be anywhere that works. At least one stallion, Cape Town, prefers to perform al fresco, on the grass, with all the usual team in attendance, plus one guy giving helpful pushes from the rear.
By the time Storm Cat enters the shed, the video camera is rolling (for lawsuits and insurance) and the mare -- Rootentootenwooten, in this case -- is standing with her head against the wall, wearing padded booties on both hind feet. Storm Cat neighs or hollers or roars -- whatever it is, it’s frightening and long and full of the inevitable, like the squeal of tires that you know will end in shattering glass. Then he measures himself and rears while the team rushes around him. There are two schools of natural cover: pasture breeding, where horses are let loose in a paddock together, and hand breeding, where a squad of breeding-shed professionals choreograph the proceedings for safety and speed. Overbrook prefers the latter, as practically all large-scale breeding operations do, and their version of it takes at least five people: two to soothe and distract the mare, one to steady the stallion, a tail man, and the stallion manager. When Storm Cat rears, the tail man lifts up the mare’s tail, and
Wes Lanter, wearing a latex glove, pilots Storm Cat to the place he probably would have found on his own, but not as quickly.
All the majesty of the act is in the roaring, apparently -- count to fifteen and it’s over. Somebody says “Good cover” with a mixture of appreciation and relief, and Storm Cat, still draped across Rootentootenwooten's
back, fits the curl of his neck to hers and allows himself a
moment of unstallionlike tenderness before he backs off and
puts his feet on the ground again. The stallion manager pulls
down a handheld shower nozzle, of the sort you find in French
bathtubs, to wash Storm Cat off. Then the groom leads the sire
away, through the stallion barn, down the hill, and back into
the shadows of the covered bridge. Lanter pulls off his latex
glove and says, "He's what everybody hopes happens to
them when they retire."
-- Kevin Conley, "A Stud's Life, The New Yorker
"Sodomy with a Horse,
basement detail, sandstone, Lakshmana Temple, Khajuraho,
Central India, Chandella Period, 10th century, photographed by
Stella Sneed
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