HGG Community Forums

I breed for an aggressive increase in breeding quality in each generation.

Mares that you decide to remove from your program who are a bit older might make great surrogate mares if you're going to be doing a fair amount of embryo breeding. Younger mares with decent PTs you should probably snip and add to your show herd so they can make lots of money for you in the show bonus. I tend to snip and auction lower gen mares, snip and keep upper gens as show ponies. Remember that your recipient mare list starts from the bottom of the alphabet instead of the top, so mark those mares with a Z at the front of their names for easy use in the Embryo Transfer Lab!

If your mares are papered, you need to decide on a paper cut off line for each generation. I always cull Yellow mares. I expect Foundations and gen 2 to be Red, but have some Blue at gen 2. My gen 3s and 4s must be Blue. I hope to start producing Golds at gen 5 eventually but I probably have 6 or 8 months of work to get there. If you can afford to PT lots of foals, having a cut of for Average Foal PT for each generation can also be helpful. I start evaluating mares on their AFPT after they are Papered and re-evaluate them every season. If they drop below my cut off, they come out of the herd.

Another way I personally cull, in a much more relaxed way, is if I have a mare who is producing mostly snipped foals. A mare with 5 or 6 out of 7 or 8 foals that are snipped and who also has an AFPT that is skimming my cut off line may be culled, while one who has lots of snips but a really high AFPT for her generation is more likely to stay in the program because she's making me lots of great show ponies. I make notes on my mare pages about snipped foals...its very time consuming but it helps me keep a check on this.

As for your stallions...

I personally require my gen 2 stallions to paper B (A From boosted lines) and to compare AGA one of my boosted line gen 2 A stallions. My gen 3 stallions must be A and compare superior to a gen 2 A. My gen 4s are A (and now one *Star!) who are superior to the gen 3s. I would love to pull my gen 4 herd up so that they compare AGA a low *Star. Gen 5 and up must be *Stars.

Does a stallion who has "bad" sons also have bad daughters? Well....I breed almost exclusively in pastures with the full pasture bonus and generally in fairly large batches so that my boys are putting 30-50 foals on the ground at a time. Of those 30 to 50 foals, I might get one or two colts who are superior to their dad. I assume I'm getting a similar number of fillies that are really superior breeders. Lets say I got 25 colts and 25 fillies from a stallion one season. I'm hoping there are 4 or 5 total superior foals. With my pasture bonus in my foundation and gen 2 pastures, I expect to get probably another 30 total foals that are AGA or very slightly superior to their parents, and then the final 15 who are worse. Those numbers get less favorable as I go up the generations because my mare herds haven't caught up with my stallions yet. But we are getting there!

If you have a stallion who isn't producing ANY superior colts, I would hazard a bet his fillies aren't any good either. But remember those superior fillies are few and far between just like the colts and are much much harder to identify!

For your B gen 3s....Before I could afford to test everything at will, I know I let some inferior colts slip out into the general population...now that I can afford to test, only colts that live up to my own high standards are sold intact. My question for you would be this--lets say it's 4 months down the road and you've made some good strides in improving the quality of your herd. Are you now going to look at the offspring of your colts that you know are inferior and be less inclined to buy them because you know they are likely to not live up to your new standards? If the answer is yes, snip those bad boys. No point letting other people breed foals that are inferior to what you want in your herd with your own stallions.

Leave autospay on for everything! Why would you want an inferior breeding horse ever? My one exception to this rule is I Consistency test my best pasture foals (from the email we aren't currently getting) with auto spay off. I'm willing to spend the GMT to fix that in my best pasture foals. Other than that, everything gets auto snipped!

Oh--and use Gelding Papering if you have it! If you have a mare throwing lots of colts snipped by GA, it can be helpful to know if she's throwing Showable Only colts. I snip all mares that throw a Showable Only since it's two whole paper levels below the lowest paper you should be breeding for (B in gen 2s).

If I am undecided about snipping any foal, I will stash it in a barn and wait til it is 2. Not to see any improvement in the horse, per se, but more to see if I still feel the same way about it a week, or a month later.

In the old days, if you spayed/gelded a horse before they were 6 years old you would get the best bonus. Don't know if that is still true, or was only a WHG thing, but I never worry too much about altering before they are 6.

I don't breed on as large of a scale as Cheers or Confluence but I have brought some of their rules/standards into my program this year. It really makes a difference in your program and because of that I am completely restructuring my breeding program for the next year and I will be much harder on culling. That being said, it's not easy. I learned the valuable lesson of running all my colts/fillies through their testing before I even look at them. My first crop of foals at the beginning of the month produced this guy.
I was so excited. I held my breathe as I sent him through his testing and he passed SMA/SAT and has a PT score of 12.2. Sounds pretty good, until I papered him. His sire is a *Star papered stallion and he only papered A. He tested as good as his sire, but in the end it's just not good enough. Gelding him is painful for me but it's what needs to be done. He'll be a pretty show pony and hopefully get lots of points. By leaving the auto/spay geld on and not looking at any of them until they pass all their testing eliminates a lot of heartbreak. The way I see it is, if the game says they aren't good enough then I shouldn't be breeding them anyway regardless of how pretty and shiny they might be.

Sounds like fun. This has been a great read. It gives me some ideas.

Same here. I am new here (10 days) and have learned a lot from these forums. I just went through and dropped my yearling 2nd gen B papered Stallions down to 1. Of course the best one (comparison test) ended up being the plain chestnut. :(

100% agree with Lacy. It's much easier to start with the bland horses and kick up you quality before trying to add in color later. As I mentioned before, I spent a good 8 months playing with nothing but color and random generation. After playing for over a year I have to do an almost complete barn flush

That's a great mindset to have!