From army horse to Internet...
 |
The «Society for Encouraging the Breeding of Horses for the Army» started in 1920. It aimed to encourage the breeding of horses mainly destined for the mounted Belgian Army.
The breeding of horses for the army had a difficult start as it had to compete with the French saddle horses, strongly supported by the National Stud Farms.
Influenced by the trend of the market, the few breeder sallied in the Society continue breeding horses for leisure and army. As of 1930, army and transportation are motorised, which reduces the outlets. At the same time, the Association changes name and become «the Belgian Half-Blood», which promoted the breeding of a lighter saddle horse, which was more elegant by using sires closer thoroughbreds.
|
|
The second world war slows down and reduces the Society’s activities, although it continued to register foals... Adapting to the new circumstances, the requirements of the invader and the needs of the Belgian customers, the breeders start breeding carriage horses. The requisitions of the German army impoverishes the number and quality of the Belgian half-blood horses, and at the end of the second world war, only a few mares and some trotter stallions are left: it is therefore necessary to rebuild breeding farms and to improve the remaining ones, by stimulating the breeders to breed half-blood horses.
The interest in equestrian sports, as well in Belgium as abroad, pushes the breeders to improve their breeding (or to create new ones) by importing mares and stallions of quality, often of prominent origin (mainly French but also English, Irish, German ...) and they finally formed the kernel of the breeding of the modern sports horse.
As a reward for the accomplished efforts and the obtained results after half a century of existence, our Association becomes"Royal Society" in 1967.
The "Royal Belgian Sports Horse Society", since 1991 better known under the name of «Stud-Book sBs», launches an ambitious program both on zoo technical and on communication level. The notion ‘performance’ becomes a priority and the choice of sires is very strict. Stud-Book sBs puts at the disposal of the breeders a new passport, fully agreed by the Ministry of Agriculture, the National and International Federations of Equestrian Sports, the World Federation of Stud-Books and all the foreign breeding authorities: the famous sBs Blue Book is born and more than 20,000 copies are circulating today!
At the beginning of this third millennium, sBs made another daring step by offering to all the surfers of the world its complete database, free of charge.
This new tool allows everybody to follow step-by-step the elaboration of a breeding file of a sBs horse, to navigate throughout the pedigrees of more than 90000 sports horses, to analyse the performances and to discover the programs and results of competitions etc... And at the same time, to strengthen the communication links.
|
|
