Nite Watch Farm

[Black Duchess]

I am looking for informations about the Nite Watch Farm located in Maryland:

http://www.spookhouse.net/nitewatchfarm/sires.html

They offer the german bred stallion ORAKEL by Nebos.

I tried to verify the pedigree of the horse, but I could not find any informations about Oracle. I checked Equiline, the French and the German Stud Book.
Even the mother I couldn't find.

I wonder whether the farm and the stud realy exits?

Can anybody give me some help?

Thanks in advance!

[madelyn]

Umm. looks like a joke or something. The site has "stallions" listed next to Breyer horses. They are little plastic toy horses. Little plastic toy fences. You might want to continue if you have a little plastic mare to breed.

[Black Duchess]

I also think it is a joke, but I am looking for some confirmation for it.

[SwordDancer]

Nite Watch is assocoated with a fantasy horse racing game. I will contact her to make sure that there is a notice to this effect on her site. Most of the sites that I know have this informaton.

[Black Duchess]

Thanks for the information!

It would have been too nice to find such a successful son of Nebos in the States.

[Crystal]

interesting to see she found a nice german stud to stand at her SIM farm... wonder what connections she has!

[Deartoall81]

The owner (Judy) is not some "sim kid"; she is an accomplished "customizer" of plastic horses; and we both are connected with the hobby of fantasy horse racing - it's akin to fantasy football, but not the quite the same.

Fantasy footballers "draft" real players into their teams. Fantasy racers "create" horses from established fantasy TB sires and dams, who trace back to real horses.
Sire lines which in the real TB world are extinct/endangered, can live again, or even flourish in fantasy racing!
I enjoy researching pedigrees and delving into the history of horse racing, so participation in this hobby is a fun way to both relax, and feed my passion for research.

You may be familiar with cyber racing sites like Digiturf, but this circuit is far older and developed from the model horse showing clubs of the 1970s.
We have come a long way from races for 3yo bay horses, and names drawn out of a hat, we strive to be as realistic as possible.

Ironically, there is a a thread on the All Breed database on a similar subject. Apparently some "sim kids" had appropiated the images and names of horses living today for their sim websites.

Over the years, we fantasy racers have had some "portrait models", but we've always asked permission from the owners of the real horses first.

[summerhorse]

I am part of the same group and most of us do put a notice on our sites that they are MODEL horses (although until they actually do something of note they really only exist on paper most of the time, the kiss of death to success for a "model" racer is to actually give it a body and get attached to it! They seem to fail every time! So you wait until they are established enough to rate "breeding" to get a body). She may have just thought that her site would not come up in a general search and didn't think about qualifying it.

And yeah we've been around since the 70s (early 60s for some people), WAY before the fancy cyber fantasy racing sites.

The Sim groups are an entirely different matter. We also had trouble with many of them (most are kids but not all) stealing our photos (usually they change the name and make up the rest of the info or copy it from a real site) for their sites.

you can see my page at: http://www.geocities.com/summerhorse2
You can see the notice is right there.

But then I've sold some stuff on ebay and had people write and ask about it for real horses when it CLEARLY states in the title and description it is for MODEL horses NOT real horses.

The difference here is that OUR horses actually EARNED their records. They went out (either in person or by photo or card for racing) and competed for their awards.

Most of us try to make sure ALL our pedigrees are realistic as to age and have them trace back to real horses so that the pedigree will always live on even if the model were to disappear or "die" as they do age over time. I know a lot of my stallions are getting long in the tooth. I may Re-ID them or keep them up for people who need older horses for new pedigrees. But as time goes on the horses in the pedigree become more model than real. Sometimes a new infusion of stallion blood is used because we like a horse and want him in a pedigree. We try to be very careful using mares and use only open years. of course before the net those were very hard to find so those old pedigrees will have some conflicts as to color (before we knew so much about color genetics) and years used but that couldn't be helped so they are grandfathered in or changed if the error is too glaring.

Some people say you do WHAT with TOY horses? But the models on my page that make it to breeding status are all quite expensive (you could rescue a horse out of the kill pens at New Holland for what some of these models are worth and for a few of them 2 or 3 horses!) and I don't see this as any different from people on the net creating fantasy football games or racing strings or heck, playing Dungeons and Dragons. (that is something I never got but I don't look down on the people who enjoy it, just not my cup of tea)

[madelyn]

One major benefit of the TOY ones over the real ones is DIET..

[summerhorse]

And no vet bills, low or no stallion fees, no board bills, it only costs about $10-20 to ship one cross country...