HGG Community Forums

Alright, you've got a couple of things tangled up in here. Hopefully I can clarify some of them for you.

1: PT scores have nothing to do with breeding ability. When you're looking at lined horses, the breeding ability of the sire and dam are mathed together two different times to get the resulting foal's PT score (which is showing ability) and their breeding ability (which is represented in their papers.) So you can have a foal with a high PT score and relatively low breeding ability, or high breeding ability but a relatively low PT score. (I say relatively because there's a fixed range you should anticipate between crosses: foundation x foundation has one range, exceptional x exceptional has another. etc.) All bets are off with foundation horses; except for Exceptional Producers, their PT scores can be just about anything and it won't tell you anything about their breeding ability.

2: Because of that breeding range thing, your best bet is always going to try to be matching like to like: foundation x foundation, exceptional x exceptional, etc. When you breed regular creates to exceptionals, you'll get more automatically altered foals because of how the testing formulas work.

3: Don't look at the ratio of intact to non-intact babies; it's exceedingly misleading. For one, many people yum altered foals for various reasons. For another, it's actually pretty random: I have solid quality blue mares that I know are fantastic for their generation who repeatedly give me nothing but altered foals. It's just a matter of how the dice roll. It's not a bad thing, either. Show horses are where the money is. More horses = more money! If you don't have enough money, you need more horses! I'm not even kidding about this.

4: Are you using strict breeding advice? It is, in fact, pretty strict. But in the long run that's actually for the best, because you can be reasonably confident that the foals it leaves you are pretty good. They're not guaranteed to be improvements over their sires and dams (oh let me count the number of about-as-good-as colts I've gelded already this season...) but it DOES wipe out the lower tier of breeders you might otherwise have to contend with. (I'm looking at you, fillies...)

5: H&J has always been a game that needs a long game strategy. The foals you have now will add up over time, over the seasons, and at some point you'll find yourself wishing for the days when you only had a few intact babies at a time.

TLDR, you're not doing anything wrong! It's just a really, really complicated issue. :)