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Also, a horse with a high PT is more likely to be a better producer, as SBA will spay/geld if the horse is a significantly better show horse than producer :)

The reason we look at what the mare produces is that shows her breeding quality. If a mare consistently produces worse foals than another when bred to the same stallion, she has lower breeding quality than the other.

@levesel2 my understanding of this is spotty, but I will see if I can word it in some way that makes vague sense.

So there used to be a test called Show Aptitude Test which would snip horses if they would be a better show pony than a breeder. This was separate from Breeding Advice, and was the “weakest” of the tests that wouId automatically snip ponies for you.

When Ammit reworked the Breeding Ability and Strict Breeding Ability tests, Showing Aptitude basically got rolled into BA/SBA.

As far as I know, we don’t know exactly how this test worked. My speculation (and this is pure speculation!) is that the test looks at Showing Ability and Breeding Ability and snipped if the horses Show Ability hidden number was higher. We know horses with higher PTs have higher Showing Ability (not that they will be better show ponies, because there is an aspect of luck there).

So, let’s say you have a pasture full of ExPro mares with the full bonus and you bred them to an ExPerf stallion. You get foals with a whole range of PTs, from the high 9s to the high 10s. Your fillies that pass and paper Red in the high 9s *may not* be as good of breeders as the fillies that pass and paper Red in the high 10s. Their parents are similar, so they should have a similar bottom cut off number, but the higher PT mare may also have to have a notch better breeding ability to pass the Showing Aptitude portion of the test.

Some people cull to a PT for this reason, snipping low PT foals that pass testing.

Please note that there is no way to tell if those lower PT mares are actually worse than their high PT siblings! You may be snipping awesome breeders if you do this.

I figure if a foal can pass SBA, she probably deserves to have babies. But if you need to cut your numbers for space, or if you only have access to BA, it’s worth it to keep this in mind.

PT scores have no direct relation to breeding ability, from two expro horses you could get foals that might be a high red or even blue but have a low PT, as well as ones that have a high PT and paper yellow! And everything thing inbetween!
However by assessing mares on their average AFPT, we aren't just judging her ability to produce show horses, because higher breeding quality mares will throw higher PT's as well as foals with better breeding ability. So yes although we are looking at the foals PT score, it is still an indication of mare quality. Of course it will be even better when we have mare comparison!