In search of a good rogering

How long should one wait between having babies? I haven't the faintest, but it's been a topic of discussion this week with Britain's Princess Kate having got herself pregnant a year after producing her first sprog.

It's a postmodern debate as women through the ages have not had much choice in the matter.

In the animal world they still don't have.

Barefoot, pregnant and in the paddock is certainly the maxim in the racehorse breeding world.

Postmoderns might feel it's cruel to have mares producing offspring every year, but it's the order of things in nature - something easily forgotten by "civilised" people.

So, with my mare Free Pass having delivered a 2014 baby (and an adorable filly it is, too), it's time to get busy on another one. I'm paying the bills and I need the faint hope of return on investment in the form of a foal who will grow up and win me millions - or even a measly race or two.

The search is on for a mating.

There are plenty of stallions to choose from. At the top end of the market is reigning champion sire Silvano, from whom a covering will set me back a cool R150000. A similarly pricey rogering can be had from Dynasty, while Trippi and Captain Al get it up for a cheque of R120000.

All these stallions are based in the Western Cape, so if I were to opt for one I'd have to ship the old girl all the way down there from KZN for her couple of minutes with the big swinging dick - at my own cost.

Thoroughbred breeding's natural order of things is that the guys travel no further than their farm's covering barn.

But an expensive sire is no guarantee of a good runner; which is why we search through pedigrees for bloodline matches that have worked before - aka "nicks". We hope to find a nick at about R5000 a jump.

The objective is to "breed back" to great horses of the past. Thus we have cross-breeding or duplication of grandparents, great grandparents and older ancestry.

It's all hellish complicated and is called genetics. The man to blame is a strange 19th-century Silesian monk called Gregor Mendel, who experimented with crossbreeding peas in the monastery veg garden and uncovered a world of recessive and dominant genes and a way to predictably replicate certain genetic characteristics.

Italian horse breeder Federico Tesio adapted the veggie theory and changed the face of the thoroughbred industry by producing great racers like Ribot and Nearco.

The latter was grandsire of the fabled Northern Dancer of the 1960s, himself the ultimate "granddaddy" of the modern racehorse through a matrix of crossbreeding.

But the science is very far from perfect, and every breeding guru mentions the word "luck" quite a lot.

Anyway, I have my TesioPower computer programme whirring away, spitting out names of likely looking blokes for my girl.

But hey, I might just send her over to that chap in a nearby paddock. Cheap; no transport hassles. And he looks like he needs cheering up.