HGG Community Forums

So how do you breed for high PT? :)

The PT of any individual horse tells you nothing about that horse's breeding ability, but the Average Foal PT (AFPT) of its offspring does give you a good idea of its that parent's breeding quality, especially if you can compare it to other mares in your string that have been bred under the same conditions to the same stallions (so you need to control for pasture bonus and stallion quality a bit if you want to compare your mares).

Like Maribo, I have some foundation mares with PTs below 2 that are amazing broodmares, with AFPTs above 10.0 and a high proportion of intact offspring. I would recommend that you try to build your foundation breeding herd with, in particular, top stallions, whether they be Rank Special, Perfect Foundation, Top Notch Producer or rescued from Foundation Rescue. As many mares from the same sources as you can get helps. Using the full pasture bonus for as many mares as you can afford to will also help push up the quality of your foals... And PTing foals will help you decide who to cull and who to keep....

hiddenvfarm, you said "One of my perfect foundation studs has a super low PT score. Like a 4 or 5"

Perfect Foundations always have a PT score of 9.9, so he can't be a Perfect Foundation.
As said above, a horses PT score isn't a reflection of their breeding ability, only of their parents breeding ability. So PT score doesn't matter too much on foundations, however watch PT scores on foals to help you work out how good their parents are

He is a Top Notch Producer, rather than a Perfect foundation. He is guaranteed to produce the best babies he possibly can. The PT is his Performance Test, performance as in a show, not the breeding shed! :p

Usually we don't know the magical mystery woo that is the breeding score. With a TNP you can be sure his is darned good!

So, Hidden--I was just looking at your TNP boy's offspring. If you look at that first page of them, you see lots of 9._ and 10._ PTs on his foals and then a random 7.something. So when I see something like that, where I have a horse consistently producing foals with a PT in a range, and then suddenly someone is much lower, I would take a very close look at that horse's mom, and also watch that horse and her babies. In a lot of ways, this game is just a bunch of stats attached to some pretty pixel ponies. When you have a major outlier, that may signal that something is wrong. It's hard to tell though because that foundation mare only has the one foal...which isn't enough of a sample size to really tell!