All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.

Quarter Horses, Cloning, and the Moral Definition of a Breed Standard
Jeannette Vaught, Cal State-Los Angeles

     Quarter Horses are considered one of the earliest breeds of horse that is “native” to the United States, and certain horses have been called Quarter Horses by Americans since the late seventeenth century. However, when the American Quarter Horse Association formed as a breed registry and studbook in 1940, it strategically defined this breed through bloodlines rather than use, and it set strict rules governing sexual encounters between horses in order to accurately define biological parentage.

     This parentage standard was debated and upheld when new reproductive technologies such as Artificial Insemination (AI) and Embryo Transfer (ET) became desirable for breeders in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the technology of cloning in the early 2000s threatened to disrupt the fundamental definition of registrable Quarter Horses based on male-female parentage.

     My presentation unpacks the role of an association like the AQHA in defining what a “breed” is in the context of cloning specifically. To the AQHA, the procedure seemed to push beyond the acceptable boundaries of assisted reproduction techniques into a deviant sexual territory. Cloning endangered two-parent breed standards, threatening to dismantle its entrenched structure of selective breeding. However, while other carefully tended European studbooks made adjustments for cloned horses, the AQHA redoubled its efforts to exclude cloning from its registry. While its interests were described as economic, the AQHA most effectively deployed the moral rhetoric of “unnatural reproduction” that surrounded debates over cloning (and non-heteronormative human sexual relations) taking place in the broader media landscape.

Read our Member Monday profile of Jeannette Vaught here.