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Mike Miola owns Silver Spurs Equine in Scottsdale and boasts he has “37 of the finest breed stallions in the world.”

Mike Miola owns Silver Spurs Equine in Scottsdale and boasts he has “37 of the finest breed stallions in the world.”

Silver Spurs Equine owner Mike Miola has earned an international reputation for his horses.

Small wonder that his horse-breeding business at 14445 E. Quail Track Road in Scottsdale ships a small but significant part of his top-of-the-line, high-performance stallions around the world: their semen.

“We freeze the semen in liquid nitrogen. It’s a complicated process,” Miola explained. “And we ship the frozen semen to our distributors in those countries. And they sell the breedings.”

“We ship breedings from our stallions all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Europe, Israel, Australia.”

Miola, who has owned the business with his wife Michelle since 2005, boasted, “We have 37 of the finest breed stallions in the world.”

And those horses are part of another aspect of his business – raising 150 babies a year.

“We sell those high-performance babies to various competitive ranches that are the showmarks of the industry in all different western saddle sports like reining, working cow, cutting, bough racing and Quarter Horse racing,” he explained.

The couple hasn’t always been in the horse business.

“I owned a company called NorthStar Financial which was one of the largest money managers in the United States,” said Miola.

“We had mutual funds, hedge funds, a brokerage firm, a bank, you name it. If it had anything to do with money, we owned it.”

When they sold NorthStar in 2015, they were “managing over $300 billion,” he added.

Miola and his wife moved to Arizona in 2002, shortly after losing many friends in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.

Over time, the couple grew Silver Spurs Equine and now, “we’re the largest breeder of the American Quarter Horse in the world,” Miola said.

“I always had diversified portfolios,” explained Miola, adding that portfolio does not include training the horses.

“When we got into ranching, we wanted to dedicate ourselves to breeding. I bought all of the great stallions in the industry so I would have a well-diversified portfolio of stallions. Our stallions breeding fee ranges from $500 to $10,000 depending on the stallion.”

In addition to their Scottsdale ranch, the Miola’s also have one in Oklahoma.

“We do all of our breeding here,” Miola said. “We put about 50 babies on the ground here and then we ship them to Oklahoma where they’re weaned from their mamas. That’s where the rest of our babies are born.”

On his 60-acre Scottsdale ranch, Miola said he has close to 300 horses at any one time and about the same number in Oklahoma, where he owns about 750 acres.

“For a mare to have a foal, the gestation period is 11 months, 11 days,” Miola explained. “Our mares were all champions in the show pen when they were youngsters and for some mares, we want to have more than one baby out of them.

“They can only carry one year and they never have twins.”

He also relies on in vitro fertilization “just as they do with human beings.”

“We have the same equipment as any in vitro fertilization clinic in the United States,” Miola added.

He employs 15 people in Arizona, including two full-time veterinarians, and over 20 more in Oklahoma.

He said stallions that are cared for can live 25-30 years. Three of his are 25 years old – well beyond the competition age of 3.

All the babies and most of the stallions are named at Miola’s ranches.

“What you try to do is get the dam and the sire (mom and dad) somehow mixed into the name,” Miola explained.

“They’re such hams, my stallions. They’re photographed all the time for various magazines. They don’t want to photograph me. They want to photograph the horse.

“If you go to an equine magazine, you’ll always see a horse and rider. But when they use one of my horses, Spooks Gotta Gun, on the cover, it’s only Spooks. He’s famous.”

Spooks has unique coloring with brown fur on his body and a white face.

He said that in Scottsdale, “I’m with them every day along with my wife and the whole staff. We pamper them. They have their own swimming pool, they have their own spa and air-conditioned stalls. A lot of people, when they see it, ask if they can rent a stall and live here. We get very attached to them.”

Another part of Miola’s business is rescuing horses.

“One thing I’m very proud of is that every year, for those recent mares I mentioned…we rescue them from the killers that are going to ship these beautiful horses to Mexico to make dog food,” said Miola.

“We rescue a little over 200 a year. We bring them to our ranch. They get all the tender, loving care. They are such beautiful horses. How people can think of killing these horses is beyond me. Most of them stay with us but every year we find homes for about 200.”

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