HGG Community Forums

Most of these foals are out of unpapered mares, so papering their dams might help you make some decisions about them. For example if you got a Red filly from a Blue dam, then you may want to snip the filly since she's not as good as her mom. Personally, I'd snip all the inconsistent foals and put them in my show string but I don't like inconsistency in my breeding stock. You might not mind inconsistency for breeding horses which is totally fine.

Also, it looks like you have a premium upgrade so did they go through SBA or just regular breeding advice? If they only went through regular advice, you could put them all through SBA and see if they get snipped or not. That way, you know that you aren't keeping anything intact for breeding if it's worse than the parents, and anything that gets through SBA is at least as good as both parents.

It gets tricky when you are trying to figure out a suitable pairing for a horse that's very uneven. You know what paper level the uneven horse has but you probably won't have a good idea about where its ability lies within that range. Let's say you have an uneven Blue papered mare. Is she a low Blue, medium Blue, or high Blue? If your goal is to get intact foals, you'll have to match her with a stallion of similar ability and that can be hard to do if you don't really know your mare's ability.

Or, you could just breed these mares to a *Star stallion with a very high AFPT and you'll end up with some nice altered foals with great PT scores to add to your show string. Personally, I think this is the option I would go for, at least for all the Blue papered mares. I would probably spay the Red papered mare and put her in my show string. If uneven breeding bothers you at all, I would go ahead and geld the colts and put them in your show string too. You need a lot more mares than stallions, so you might as well snip the colts that aren't quite what you want. If you keep a colt intact that you aren't completely happy with, you'll probably find yourself using your other colts instead, so you might as well snip now and get some more training bonus.

I don't care about even... well I lean towards it for sale purposes, but I don't judge a horse poorly because It is uneven, I just paper it and put it with the generation of similar quality.

With PT I look at the average foal pt pf mares to cull the weaker ones of a paper level since I can't comparison test them. Don't look at the PT scores of the individual horses themselves to pick out breeding horses. I look at PT to choose which alters need to be kept. Keep all the high PT scored one regardless of generation or evens or whatnot.

With the advent of Papering mares at birth, it is much easier to breed uneven generations and still get an increase in quality. That's awesome--you know straight out of the gate roughly what breeding quality your mares are. That said, Red and Blue and Gold all cover an increasingly wide range of breeding abilities....so is your uneven Blue mare a low gen 3 quality Blue? Or a high gen 5 quality Blue?

I intend to continue breeding evenly for my breeding stock, though I am currently crossing upper gen stallions over my little herd of foundation mares to build up some show stock again. That said, I can totally see the allure of doing an uneven experiment and I'm considering a line of uneven Ice 1s for a shiny show line. I would be focusing mostly on getting really high PTs from them but I would keep some intact to perpetuate the line for breeding....we will see if I actually do it, and how frustrated I get with it!

I don't have much issue with horses that are a bit uneven over gen 5. I suspect I would be inclined to keep some of your fillies but the colts would have to be really special color wise and they would have to be thoroughly Comparison tested to figure out where they hit in my hierarchy of even gen stallions....or again you could pick the best one and use him to sire a shiny show line!

I don't care. Do what makes you happy. Even helps in getting the most number of intact foals.

I try to breed even in my lines just because it's easier to figure out. I have a few uneven breeders I've picked up along the way either cheaply or with rare genes like Ice, and I've found them hard to breed.

For instance, my Ice stallion is B papered, but breeding him to a bunch of 2nd gen mares resulted in 100% spelds from Breeding Advice. I'm not sure if this was just bad luck or if he's maybe like a 3rd gen level high B - if he were even I'd know better where he fell.