Cahill Resets His Own Revolution

[Wandering Eyes]

Helping to create what he now calls “a monster” weighs heavily with Dr. Chris Cahill. Actually, he has a way to put it back in the cage. But let's not get ahead of ourselves; let's first remind ourselves how it all happened.

Cahill came to Lexington from Texas for the 1974 breeding season as a $75-a-week rookie veterinarian at Hagyard-Davidson-McGee. One of his main duties was as standby in the Gainesway breeding shed. Albeit then standing “only” 14 stallions, John Gaines was still ahead of the curve in requiring a vet in attendance for every cover.

One evening Cahill arrived and was told that Gaines wanted to meet him. He found the boss sitting on a countertop smoking a cigarette.

“Just tell me what you do here,” Gaines said. “What am I paying you for?”

“Well,” replied the young man. “I'm trying to keep from being bored.”

And he told Gaines how he would take a dismount sample from each stallion, put it under a microscope, grade its concentration and motility, investigate anything unusual. He was also keeping a file on each mare, data he could revisit to learn about those that didn't get in foal. “Basically just keeping myself busy,” he said. “You're not being charged extra.”

After a year, he returned to Texas A&M to teach surgery and reproduction. One day he was scrubbing up for surgery when his secretary came on the intercom.

“A call, Dr. Cahill.”

“Well, take a message. Who is it?”

“John Gaines.”

“I'll take the call.”

Having only ever had that single conversation, Gaines wanted to hire Cahill. He'd added another seven stallions, wanted to move Joe Taylor into the office. Cahill could take over the day-to-day remit while also serving as resident veterinarian.

Cahill's wife was eight months pregnant with their second child, and they had just moved into a new home. He took the job.

“But I'll tell you one thing,” he told Gaines. “I know what I don't know and I'm not afraid to say it. If I get in a jam, I'll go find somebody that's smarter than me.”

Gaines respected that. For one thing that Cahill didn't understand, however, nobody had convincing answers: why were these stallions being confined to 45 mares?

“Hard to believe now,” Cahill reflects. “But at places like Claiborne and Darby Dan, if they doubled a stallion–let him breed two mares in one day–they'd give him the next day off. So I told Mr. Gaines, 'Let me tell you something I learned in vet school. A stallion kicks out 10-to-15 billion sperm per ejaculate. So in the Quarter Horse business, breeding artificial, the research went: how many times can I cut that up before the pregnancy rate comes down? Is it the same with 100 million as 12 billion? After that, the next question is: can you breed a stallion into a sperm deficit, to the point where he starts shooting blanks? But to me, it was a waste to breed to 45 mares.”

Gaines immediately began throwing bonus seasons (to use or sell) into 40-share syndications, typically every other year, producing a 65-mare book. Lyphard's shareholders received three in five years, putting him at a giddy 78. The whole community was shocked. Moreover, Gaines could now raise his bids for new stallions.

“Everyone thought we were crazy,” Cahill recalls. “Even Lloyd's of London. They were going to quit insuring fertility. They paid off one year on two stallions that failed in Europe, and their vets told them they'd been breeding too many mares. I flew to London and showed them the records I was keeping on every stallion: morning, noon, night covers; which mares got in foal, from which cover, which had live foals. I guess I got through, they kept insuring us.”

During those heady years, Gainesway spiraled to four times as many stallions as before.

“That was probably my biggest achievement, standing 52 stallions and breeding 22 mares an hour through that shed,” Cahill reflects. “I just didn't know any better, I was a complete innocent, but that meant I didn't have any preconceived ideas.”

They had stallions crammed everywhere, needed more space. Cahill suggested developing the old dairy out back.

“And who are you going to put over there?” replied Gaines. “There are no second-class citizens here. Every shareholder, every horse, gets treated alike-whether it's a $2,500 or $200,000 cover. Because you never know what's just walked into that barn.”

Instead they designed a whole new stallion complex, plus a second breeding shed. “Everybody in the business is waiting for us to fall on our butts,” Cahill told the architects. “This has to work.”

Taylor, of course, was a tremendous mentor in his own right.

“I know for a fact he's in heaven now-because he never fired anybody!” Cahill says with a chuckle. “We were very different in management style. Joe was conciliatory. Back then, our main workforce was Eastern Kentucky. There was a lot of illiteracy. Some farms tied ribbons the same color on the halters and the stall door, so that they'd know where each horse went. And Joe would take any ne'er-do-well off the street. He wanted to sober them up, change lives.

“And some were good horsemen, wanted to learn. Others were very rough. But if they got in a fight, Joe would raise his voice a little and say, 'Now I want you all to get along and work this out.' And turn around and leave. That was it. A real people person. I don't pretend to be. Especially in the stallion operation, I'd rather hire somebody who wants my job, somebody sharp and hungry.”

What an education for a young man, under two authentic Bluegrass legends! To this day he cherishes Gaines aphorisms. Cahill was so bewitched by Blushing Groom that he urged loading him with their own mares. Gaines looked at him and said: “Chris, you know that old saying? Use other people's money.” In this instance, other people's mares. “Anyone who thinks he can make a stallion with his own mares is a fool.”

Credit: Horsephotos

“All business,” Cahill says. “That's all he ever was. I never saw John Gaines pat a horse, talk to them, give them a carrot. When Blushing Groom arrived, it may have been a week before he walked down to look at him. His last race, I'd asked, 'You going over to watch?' He said, 'Chris, you should know by now: I don't care if I never go to another horserace. A horserace is completely out of my hands. I have no control. You go.' To him, horses were a commodity. He could have done the same thing with hogs, wool, whatever he put his mind to.”

The biggest learning curve came when Gainesway and Spendthrift inadvertently imported CEM, with Lyphard and Caro, from France.

“I always tell people I had hair until 1978,” Cahill says. “You haven't lived until you bring an exotic disease into America. That will age you. There wasn't a mare bred in Lexington the whole of March. Everybody taking a shot at us. If we'd had another outbreak, they were shutting our doors, and we had maybe 38 stallions in. Think of that. And I'm 28 years old. We got through it. But you learned who your friends were-and your enemies. I made some of both!”

Nobody worked harder than Gaines, and he expected everyone to work just as hard. After seven years, Cahill was burned out. It was time to get to know his family again, and they spent a decade in Jackson Hole. But then they returned and today, even in semi-retirement, Cahill remains both participant and shrewd observer of the Bluegrass scene. (His son and daughter have found their own vocations here, too, at Town and Country Farms and Castleton Lyons respectively.)

As such, we must surely heed his anxieties about the way book sizes have mushroomed since a young veterinarian first opened a new horizon for Gaines. After all, this is a man who recalls John Magnier's eyes lighting up over dinner, back in 1977, when he elaborated the veterinary thinking behind Gainesway's breakout on books.

But now, Cahill admits, the revolution has lost its way. With many fees slashed mid-season, it was clear this spring that a single-year stampede is not a sustainable model. Acknowledging that The Jockey Club's attempt to take control was always doomed, Cahill instead suggests that the farms themselves take responsibility.

“Nobody's more of a free-market capitalist than me,” he emphasizes. “But breeding 200-plus mares is absurd. Anybody who ignores this, they're fooling themselves. I was personally witness to 35,000 covers. I had mares I sent home because they were too mean. I had slow breeders, fast breeders, everything in between. I've seen it all. But I never had a horse refuse a mare. But right now I need both hands to count the farms here in Lexington that are sending mares home. I'm not talking about 25-year-old stallions, I'm talking about young horses. And it's all about management.”

Cahill's solution is an expression you won't have heard before.

“A semen cartel,” he says. “Just like the oil guys do. It can't be done through outside regulation. That's been tried in other breeds, and never stands up. Everybody screams about restraint of trade. But those breeds have been ruined because they went to artificial insemination, overbred the commercial, in-vogue horses, and never gave a chance to the rest.

“So the big farms need to get together and put a number on it, let's say 125. Any farm worth their salt should be getting 80 percent live foals on the ground. If they're not, something's wrong. When I was with Gaines, we pushed 90 percent every year. Like I said, management.

“But then let's set a second number, say 100. That's the maximum you can register. Say you end up with 106 live foals. I promise you, you contact everyone and go around and look at those foals, there'll be six that would love to waive a stud fee, or take a free season.”

Easier not just on stallions, Cahill says, but on their management–and on the pocket.

“It's absurd, the amount of veterinary work just to get a mare pregnant now,” he contends. “Because people know they have one shot. So they're treating every mare like the five percent 'problem' mare that I used to deal with. Mares are no different today than in 1970. Back then, if I had 100 mares, I might have five that I did extreme things like lavage, hormone therapies, and so on. But now people are using all the extras because they're afraid not to.”

And, speaking of being afraid, he sees farms today needing to pay for a stallion before his stock get anywhere near a starting gate.

“But I learned to look at things from a John Gaines perspective,” he says. “And if only one-in-eight stallions becomes any kind of success, we're really trashing our gene pool with all these lesser ones that have no business reproducing.”

He believes that his proposal would not only spread mares more evenly across rosters, but also restore the kind of regional/overseas variegation formerly so influential in Kentucky. And he recalls working with Nelson Bunker Hunt, who only ever sold half the shares in a stallion and tried to ensure those went to end-users.

“I wish the big farms would get together on this,” he says. “Say to the industry: 'We got a new day here. This is what we're going to do and we hope the other farms jump on board.' You're always going to have some outlier that says, 'No, I'm breeding 200, I'm going to get my money now.' Well, you'll make him look like an ass. But nobody wants to take the first step. Somebody needs to admit it's time for a reset.”

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