While thinking about the foals that we have this year and the new ones on the way, I sometimes think about how humans have taken horses and bred them in a certain way in order to ‘better’ them. In most cases they want the resulting foals to, each generation, be considered more beautiful (set to breed standards) as well as more talented than their parents. And of course, over the years since the different horse breeds were created, we have successfully improved the look and talent of horses.
So sometimes I think about what the human race would be like if we’d done the same thing with ourselves. A horse with two parents who are talented jumpers will likely be a talented jumper. The same way that a child who has two musically gifted parents will likely follow in their footsteps, but in most cases this is just chance in humans. But what if, for the last hundred or so years (since humans have a much longer ‘generation’ than horses) we had taken talented musicians to breed better musicians, or people with high IQs to breed people with high IQs, or even just people with good eyesight, or people who were tall?
We, as a species, stumble around, creating children out of whatever random paring comes up, either through marriage or not. Just think about how amazing our race could be if we actually improved ourselves each generation with the purpose and planning that goes into creating World Champion horses.
