Metallic Cat

I spend more Sunday evenings than I should reading cutting results on the sofa, and for a long time the names were the hardest part. Metallic Cat. High Brow Cat. Smart Little Lena. Doc O’Lena. They look like somebody has been at the fridge magnets. Then one day it clicked that they are not names at all. They are family trees, and once you can read one you can read them all.

Here is the rule that makes it work. A registered Quarter Horse gets twenty characters for a name, spaces included. Numbers are allowed, but only at the end. No punctuation of any kind, so on paper the horse is Doc Olena and the apostrophe is something we all add back out of politeness. That is the whole rule. The registry even says, almost wistfully, that you are not required to name a foal after its pedigree.

Everybody does it anyway.

Reading the Name

Take Metallic Cat. The Cat tells you his father was High Brow Cat, the stallion who ran cutting for twenty years. High Brow Cat’s mother was Smart Little Kitty, and she was a Kitty because her father was Smart Little Lena, the first horse to win cutting’s Triple Crown. Smart Little Lena was a Lena because his father was Doc O’Lena, and the Doc goes back to a failed racehorse called Doc Bar, who has a post of his own.

Cat, Kitty, Lena, Doc. Four generations, each one leaving a word behind in the next horse’s name, like initials carved into a fence post. Nobody designed that. It just turns out that if your foal is by a famous horse, you would be daft not to say so in the one place a buyer is guaranteed to look.

And the best bit is that the word Cat was never a pedigree word to begin with. Jack Waggoner bought High Brow Cat as a foal, still at his mother’s side, and named him because he used to hide behind her and moved like a cat. That is it. A man in a field in 1988 watching a foal and thinking, that one moves like a cat. Thirty years later the word means a dynasty.

The Truck

Metallic Cat himself was foaled in 2005, a red roan colt in Colorado, and the story of how he got to Texas is the one everybody in cutting tells. A young trainer called Beau Galyean found him advertised on the internet as a two-year-old, wanted him more than he could afford, and put his truck up as collateral so the bank would lend him the money. He bet his transport on a roan colt from an online listing.

The colt won the Futurity, the big championship for three-year-olds, in Fort Worth in 2008. The cheque was $250,000. I like to think the truck was paid off that evening.

He was shown twelve times in his life and made the final every time, and then at four he went to the breeding barn, which sounds early until you remember that his father had done exactly the same thing.

What the Sons Did

This is where the twenty characters earn their keep. Once his first foals were old enough to show, the word Metallic started turning up at the front of names on every results sheet I opened, and buyers were paying for the word before the horse had done anything. Which is the naming custom working exactly as intended.

Every association counts his offspring’s winnings differently, so I will give you one. The reined cow horse people, who run a different sport from cutting altogether, made him their first Nine Million Dollar Sire last autumn. That is one sport out of several.

And the championship he won as a three-year-old now carries his name. Since 2021 it has been the NCHA Metallic Cat World Championship Futurity, because his owner pays for it to be, and I cannot think of a better use of the money. If you read the cutting post you met the name there already, on the front of the sport’s biggest event.

The Bottom Half of the Paper

The name only ever tells you about the fathers. The mothers you have to look up, and Metallic Cat’s mother is worth it. Chers Shadow was a daughter of Peptoboonsmal, another red roan, who is a son of a King Ranch horse called Little Peppy. So the roan, and a good deal of the cow sense, came up from underneath, from a mare whose name gives you no clue at all.

Then in 2019 Gary Bellenfant won the Futurity on Metallic Rey Mink, a son of Metallic Cat, with a score of 225. Bellenfant had won the same event in 1995 on Peptoboonsmal, that colt’s great-grandfather, with a score of 225. Same man, same number, same blood, twenty-four years apart. I do not believe in omens, but I would have bought a lottery ticket.

And last December Beau Galyean, the man with the truck, won the Futurity again. The horse was a grandson of the roan colt he once found on the internet. I hope somebody in the stands did the sums out loud.

Twenty Characters

So that is what a name carries. Cat, Lena, Doc, Peppy, Boon, each one a horse that did something remarkable, folded into the next generation’s name so nobody forgets. A foal born this spring with Metallic in front of its name is advertising a stallion who advertised his father who was named for the way he hid behind his mother.

If I ever have a horse of my own, I now know exactly how much room I have got. Sunday Shed Cat is fourteen characters. I have already checked. Do not tell my wife that either.