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It's easier to do it for stallions, since they can have more foals in a year than mares can, but over several game years you can at least make an estimate based on their average foal PT score or AFPT.

In order to do this, all the foals must have been Performance tested. The more foals tested, the more accurately the AFPT will give you a picture of the horse's breeding ability.

However, if the mare and stallion have widely divergent breeding abilities, the accuracy of the AFPT as a breeding ability marker will be lowered because the parent with the lower breeding ability will pull down the average for the other, while the higher breeding ability of the other will raise the AFPT for the horse with lower ability.

Total the PT scores of all foals who have been tested and divide by the number of foals. This gives you the average foal PT score.

C/Yellow horses can have foals with PT's ranging from 8.9 to 10.4. The AFPT will vary depending on the exact PTs of the living foals, but will probably be in the middle of that range somewhere.

B/Red horses will probably have foals ranging from the mid-9's to upper 10's.

A/Blue horses will probably have foals ranging from mid 10's to upper 11's.

*Star/*Gold horses will have foals with PT's from high 11's on up to 13's, 14's, and in HaJ1, the older version of Hunt and Jump, up to 15. This depends on how many generations of *Star/*Gold parents there have been and how strictly their owners have neutered the offspring. The longer a horse's pedigree is, with the owners using very strict neutering rules, the higher the AFPT is likely to be.

Especially with stallions, and if your bank balance can afford it, strict altering would mean gelding any colt that comparison tests worse than (or even about as good as, if you're being very, very strict) his sire. You would want all colts to test superior to their sires.

You might also want to test them against their brothers with the same paper level. There is enough of a range of breeding abilities in each paper level that you can have a B papered colt (for example) that comparison tests superior to (or worse than) another B papered colt sired by the same stallion.

Some players find a benchmark colt for every generation that they test all similarly papered colts of the same generation against.

Mares are a bit trickier, since we have no comparison test for them. Since we can now paper test fillies at birth, very strict altering would mean culling fillies that paper lower than or the same as their dams. However, this might not be practical until you get enough higher papered fillies in a given generation. Once they get to breeding age, you can cull the mares that produce the fewest intact foals for their generation. Give them at least 3 foals to see how they're doing. If you decide that a Red papered mare is producing a lot of neutered colts or fillies that paper lower than she did, she would be neutered, unless their PT scores make it sensible to keep her as a mother of show horses. I would probably neuter any intact fillies that papered the same as her.

Another form of strict culling, especially for your broodmares, is to cull them based on their AFPT. Again, I personally wait until they have at least 3 foals for me, but then I usually cull roughly the bottom 10 or 20% of each pasture. This also means I make room for the new “replacement” fillies to move into the pasture as they hit breeding age. Some people have strict AFPT cut offs for their mares by generation. Just remember to compare “apples to apples” and don’t expect a mare you are breeding by hand to have the same AFPT as an equivalent mare whose foals have all had the full pasture bonus.