HGG Community Forums

You want to match Red with B and Blue with A to match papers :) And sometimes its just bad luck that they get snipped. Are you using your pasture at all? Your mares get a breeding bonus the longer they stay in there which increases the chances of an intact foal :)

Using the red mares with A stallions is a good way to try and get better foals than the mares, but you will get a lot of spay/gelds, especially if not using the pastures. A red papered mare is about the same quality as a B papered stallion

I'd never really looked through that before, thanks for the link Lallyhop!

I do this with my foundations, I'm happy with those odds!

Test 4: Exceptionaly perfect foundation stallion (105% breeding ability) bred to 50 perfect foundation mares (100% breeding ability), 30+ days in pasture.
Results: 20 intact foals, 30 altered foals. Avg breeding ability 105%, Avg PT 10.21

Thanks for the help everyone!!! I hadn't been using the pasture as I wanted specific mare/stallion combos but I'll be sure to utilize my pasture from here on out. I appreciate all the advice!!

A breeding boost boosts the Breeding Ability percentage of the horse boosted. This in turn would boost the range of their individual secret roll upwards...

The secret roll is rolling two dice (one for each parent) and the foal gets the total between them. Exactly how this works for widely divergent parents (like in bootstrapping) is unknown. Shoot, I don’t really understand how it works for perfectly matched parents but it does and Ammit is a goddess and I’m so glad someone smarter than me can figure that stuff out.

Breeding boosts applied to foundations don’t totally make sense to me, but breeding boosts applied to Lined foals, especially the really special ones, to bring them up to whatever your standards are make a lot of sense to me. But that’s just how I personally breed and should not influence what anyone else wants to do.

In general, mare lag (the phenomenon of the quality of your mares collectively as a herd being somewhat less than the quality of whatever stallion you’re using) is an issue no matter how you breed. You can assume no matter what that people are probably most selective when choosing stallions to keep, since most people are keeping a tiny fraction of their total colts intact and a much much larger percentage of their fillies. There are many methods to combat mare lag, including even paper breeding, pasture bonus and culling mares by Average Foal PT. In the end, recognizing the issue and having some method that works for you to deal with it is pretty much winning that battle.

Remember that if you know you’re using a stallion that is “out of a mare’s league” you always have the option to simply not test that foal, or to Paper it but not use BA on it. This is bootstrapping and is a very legitimate way to increase the quality of your stock.

Got it! I almost always breed yellow foundations to yellpw foundations, and red to red. Then for G2, I think "high red and low red" papered, etc. The breeding boost comes up when you are using a straw - it's good to know which sort of mare has your best chance of passing with a breeding boost on the stallion!

I try to SBA my mares - unless they are special colors. I tend to use SBA to pick which of the 30 chestnut fillies to keep...