We love keeping track of the bloodlines of the Salt River wild horses. Today’s spotlight is on patriarch and retired lead stallion Sarge. (When we release interesting information about our many years of research and data collection, please feel free to share it, as long as you credit who you learned it from, SRWHMG.)

We call a lead stallion “retired” once he has been kicked out of his own band, because of old age. In other wild horse hma’s there is not a lot of research on retired lead stallions, because they are often assumed to be just another bachelor stallion. Their lifestyle is similar to bachelors, but upon closer look, very different in that they no longer do any effort to gain a mare for themselves and they try to avoid battling at all cost.
Once a stallion is retired, we know that he will not produce anymore offspring, but he can still live for many more years and quite happily. We have many retired stallions roaming around, and you can usually find them on their own, staying out of trouble.

From pictures from 2006 we can see that Sarge was an adult at that time. This means that he was born at the very latest in 2002, but probably even earlier. So that means he is 21 years at minimum and likely older. He was last seen last year around this time, but he was in good shape then, so we hope he is still out there.

In our database app we have 21 offspring for Sarge. These are all babies from his beloved lead mares that he doted over for more than a decade. Sarge had beautiful Andalusian looking conformation with a heavy curved neck, and he definitely gave that to all of his male offspring. He was not a dominant grey, but still gave his grey genes to half of his offspring, even while none of his band mares were greys.

What is very confusing for us is that his grey sons: Sky, SnowPrince, Silver and Centurion look exactly alike. When you see one, you can tell it’s a Sarge son, but we sometimes have to go by who they are hanging out with, to distinguish between them.

They are all absolutely gorgeous, with manes that are black mixed with white. It seems that the older they get, the more flea bitten they become. They also have inherited the kind and caring gene from Sarge and have the sweetest doey eyes that can melt a person from a 50 ft distance.
Soldier, who is not a grey, was Sarge’s last and possibly most well known offspring in 2020. Soldier had a rough start in life, because that’s when his dad got kicked out of the band and bachelors were fighting over his mom. Soldier and mom Serena are doing great however, and are with a good stallion who adopted Soldier as his own.

4 of Sarge’s offspring unfortunately did not make it, one died of colick, one was hit on the road, and 2 were shot to death, before the Salt River wild horses were protected. Back then, we reported several horses shot each year, and we are so glad that that has not happened since.
We hope you enjoy these pictures from our database app and that you keep supporting us in our research and field documentation. (The number behind the name is the year they were born, and their motherline is noted in parenthesis). When we click on each horse it has it’s own record of when and where it was born, it’s parentage, it’s band records, any notes of any injuries, and also band migration patterns. The pbbb means a mare has received her pzp boosters.

Please feel free to share names that we’ve published, even while using your own pictures, as long as you credit the source, SRWHMG. And of course feel free to share our posts, because the more people know, the more they care!

( FYI Some people are publishing our recorded names as if they’ve done the 20+ years of research themselves, which is why we say please just credit your source. Over 20 years of research and software development is not cheap, nor easy, and publishing our names as if you’ve done the work yourself is actionable in court, because it is our proprietary information.)

Thank you for your interest, SRWHMG.