SHIRE HORSE SOCIETY SPARKS BREEDING PROGRAMME​

SPARKS is now online at breeds.grassroots.co.uk/shire

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Introduction

The Shire Horse Society (‘the Society’) has adopted SPARKS to tackle inbreeding in the Shire horse population. This is needed because inbreeding leads to loss of genetic diversity in the population. In turn, this threatens the health of individual horses and the health and sustainability of the Shire breed as a whole, because it has the following consequences:

• increased infertility

• ​increased foal mortality (deaths)

• increased likelihood of harmful genes accumulating in the breed

• increases risk of inherited diseases and deformities

• reduced overall fitness of the breed and resistance to diseases

A powerful way of tackling inbreeding is by managing ‘Mean Kinship’ through selection of mare/stallion pairings.

What is Sparks?

SPARKS is an advisory scheme that helps manage Mean Kinship and inbreeding. It is a computer programme that calculates Mean Kinships for every living pure-bred Shire in the Studbook, measuring how related any one Shire is to all others. SPARKS also calculates the potential inbreeding of foals resulting from specific mare/stallion pairings. Based on this analysis, SPARKS produces Kinship Tables for mares.

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Scan the QR code to take you direct to the Shire

Horse Society Sparks Breeding Programme Page

for more information