Standardbreds are....

...useless except for pacing/trotting.

That's my Equine Science profs opinion.
But yeah, he really thinks that. Appearntly they aren't atheltic enough for other things. Sure maybe they aren't Grand Prix matterial but really? How many horses are? Very, very few. There's loads of people here that use them for showing at the local level in both dressage and jumping and they do quite well.

I can't decide if I like this guy or not.
So on the second day of class he was talking about different breeds of horses and how they were created, stuff like that but he just went on and on and on. This class is already 1 hour and 20 minutes. Those extra 10 minutes people need to get all the way across campus to their other classes. But he's to old and senile to understand that. So the people who did need to leave started to because he had run over his time. The next day he was all pissy and was like "we have to finish breeds today as well because people just started leaving the day before" but imagine that in some horribly unappealing voice.

It's not like he doesn't know what he's talking about. He did a lot to get the pre-vet equine program going at the UofS and he's got his own horses, years of experience and was head of some big equine organization here in Alberta, until he retired to teach one class a term.
He seems nice enough, when he's not putting his jack ass opinions into what we're learning about.

Last Thursday we were learning about the genetics behind colours which is actually really cool and if I had any of my notes I'd show you a bit of what we did. But then he's talking about appaloosa colour patterns.
He only talks about 2 patterns and can't be bothered to mention there are several others.

 Leopard Appy
Blanket Appy
Snowflake
Varnish
Few Spots
Frost

His thoughts: Leopard spotted appaloosas have terrible colouring and it is undesirable. Ummmm, what? Well maybe that's an over reaction because the horse I leased for  3 years was an appy, not a leopard one, but still....

This is Firecracker aka Diesel (the varnish/frost Appaloosa/TB I rode for about 3-4 years)

 

  Haha I found these last two going through Facebook albums, quite a treat. But yeah, he decided he'd rather not jump the skinny vertical, didn't fall off, though.

These are all from about 2009.

 

 

But yes, I'm sure there will be many more "excellent" stories from this class, hopefully most of them will just be on the science part and not the instructors own opinions.