How many twins can Poppy sire?

I stood looking at him over the back of that stud horse wondering if he was kidding or if he really thought it could happen.

Not everyone sees the world the same, and some people have misconceptions of what might happen in certain situations, but this question moved to the front of the list: "Do people really think that way?"

The question surfaced at the end of a detailed story about his stud horse "Pappy Can Run". With a name like that, you would think that everyone would want to breed their mare to him, but it just wasn't happening. Last year, he could only get eight mares booked to breed to ole Pappy, and after long hours of consideration, he had come with the answer as to why.

Seems that the year before last, Pappy bred 12 mares, and four of them wound up aborting twins. As fate would have it, three of the eight bred last year aborted twins, too. I have to admit that the odds of that happening are astronomical, but still, it was just bad luck.

There was no convincing him of that though, he had spent eight months contemplating the situation and had come up with a solution.

How many ideas must have gone through that fellow's head before he came up with this one? He must have spent countless hours wondering why no one wanted to breed to Pappy and then once he decided on the reason, he must have spent days and days coming up with a solution on how to fix it.

The real reason was, well ... "Pappy just wasn't very good. He was a bit sway backed, kind of short in the pastern, a bit jug-headed, bad slope in the shoulder, left-front leg a might crooked, but most of all, he was slower than molasses. I guess that fellow just loved Pappy so much that he couldn't see those short comings, so it had to be something else.

And that "something else" was the twinning problem. Yep, that had to be it. Because in this fellow's eyes Pappy was the perfect specimen, it had to be that the owners of all the really fast mares were afraid Pappy was throwing too many twins.

He had arrived at a solution. Yes, he had deliberated endlessly on how to solve the twinning problem. What he came up with would have never crossed my mind, but it was first on his list of things that would fix the twinning dilemma and get Pappy more mares to breed than he could handle.

The solution was found in the question. That's right; the question held the answer that would make all future breedings of Pappy a guaranteed single live foal. So what did he ask me after all that big, long history on why no one wanted to breed to the famous stud horse Pappy Can Run?

"So Doc, don't you think it would fix everything if we removed just one of his testicles?"