Dear Roper, 

On page 10, you’ll find the news of the passing of Dustin Bird’s Dolly. 

She was old—her death wasn’t untimely really. But Dolly—registered as My Frosty Cocoa with the AQHA—is still an immense loss for the horse world and the Bird family. 

She was another of those ahead-of-her-time sort of horses I’ve written about before. By the time the rope horse industry took off to the extent it has now, Dolly was nearly too old to flush embryos from by the time her career ended. 

She was too busy being great—winning almost a million dollars across her decade-plus career in ProRodeo—to make too many babies before the ICSI procedures became popular to harvest oocytes from mares without flushing. But she was nearly perfect, when I think of what we look for in head horse mares today. She was so stout and so smooth, and she went almost 10 years on the road before ever needing vet work. She was fast and gritty tough, and she’d have made one hell of a leading dam. 

Dustin has a baby out of her—a filly, thankfully, that he’s been taking things slow with on the ranch in Montana. But if Dolly were still here today, I can only hope she’d be the main feature in Julie Mankin’s “Maternal Madness” story on page 62. In that story, Mankin profiles the ProRodeo and Open-caliber mares giving breeders and everyday ropers access to world-class genetics, and I sure wish Dolly were in that mix.

Thankfully, we’ve still got legendary mares like Junior Nogueira’s Apache R Hali carrying the torch of truly proven road-warriors who can pass on their genes to the next generation, and Nogueira’s partners at GeneTech make that possible. Select Genes, too, is preserving the genetics of the great mares from across Western performance and including the Relentless Remuda’s herd. While our Horse Market issues usually cast a light on the great stallions, this one’s for the girls, so to speak. 

See you in Cheyenne, 

Chelsea