HGG Community Forums

I generally leave my mares in pasture until they have enough live foals to be papered, and then, if I have time and the necessary horses, I switch them out for unpapered mares, unless I'm changing generations for pasture breeding. I do try to switch out the stallions from year to year, so that not all the 2nd gens (for example) in a given line are sired by the same stallion.

If you have a Basic Upgrade, you will be able to paper your stallions as soon as they are created or born as foals. This will help you know if your colts are an improvement on their sires. Mares are a bit trickier, since they have to have 3 live foals before they can be papered.

However Gelding Advice and Mare Advice will give you a rough estimate. Charlie automatically gelds all colts whose Breeding Ability score is significantly worse than their sires. This means that the colt in question may have about the same breeding score, one a bit less, but not by a very large amount, or even have one that is higher than the sire's. Papering your colts will help you determine which ones will have significantly higher ability. All foundations stallions paper C, but there is a fairly wide range of abilities covered by that ranking. Not all C papered stallions have the same Breeding Ability score.

Mare Advice compares the Breeding Ability score of a filly with her dam's. It is not as strict as Gelding Advice, so there is a wider range of Breeding Ability which will allow the filly to pass. A Premium Upgrade opens up Strict Mare Advice, which Ammit has recently upgraded so that it is as strict as Gelding Advice.

Unless you are breeding specifically for show horses, when it helps to breed high generation, high papered stallions to mares with a lower ability, it is best to cross mares and stallions with as close to the same ability as you can determine. The higher your upgrade level, the more tests and data you will have available to help you do this.

At your level, a helpful rule of thumb is to breed foundation horses to foundation horses, 2nd gen. horses to 2nd gen horses and so on as the generations increase. This will not necessarily ensure that the stallions and mares will have equivalent breeding scores, but in general, they will be fairly close to the same ballpark. However, since mares take longer to paper and we are always more certain of a stallion's breeding ability than a mare's, there is a very life-like degree of uncertainty with any pairing of mare and stallion.

In addition, the Breeding Ability score covers a fairly wide range of results. It indicates a range into which the offspring's breeding and showing abilities may fall, not a single numerical result.

Members with a Basic upgrade don't have all of the helpful testing available, but you can at least make a guess as the generations increase.

AFPT = Average Foal Performance Test. It is the average of all the PT scores from a mares foal crop. It only includes foals that have been PT tested.