HGG Community Forums

Apparently I am suffering from some truly horrible mare lag. Of the ninety 9th and 10th gen foals I bred only 2 made it out intact. Problem is, I don't have enough studs of varying qualities. I have roughly 3 tiers of studs right now, My highest two, which are obviously too much for my mares. Four studs one tier below that, I will try them with my 9th gen mares next month, and one stud one tier below that. Who I will be trying the year after that, should the second tier studs also prove to be too much.

If that doesn't work, I am probably going to have to scrap the whole 3 year old breeding program. I wouldn't even know what quality of stud to put with the mares. The higher quality studs are most likely inflating my mare's AFPT scores, making it a guessing game as to what quality they actually are. They are also probably spread out over at least two, if not three tiers of breeding quality at this point. I am not looking forward to starting from scratch.

I suppose I could use my experimental, uneven breeding lines, to salvage some of the blood from my old lines. If I can get back to A/Blue, or maybe just at start of the Star/gold level of papered horses I could build from there using the new testing parameters (testing against both parents) to keep my mares and studs more even.

While I get that this will help me move the whole herd forward, taking 5 steps back to get there is not going to be fun.