HGG Community Forums

The strict breeding advice is good for weeding out those that are worse than their parents, I believe they have to be at least as good as their parents to pass.

Like all things, some foals will be worse, some as good as, and some better! Part of a good breeding program is sorting out and identifying those inferior horses, or best ones!

I don 't think that strict breeding advice requires foals to be at least as good as, but it definitely brings up the overall average.

But how are you defining "worse than" ? You mean they got auto-clipped by one of the tests? 1 out of 4 getting through intact is actually about right. To broaden your perspective on that (you have a 4 foal pool here) I have 981 yearlings this year. (I don't actually know how I ended up with this many. Seriously. Normally I'm closer to 700... anyway.) 235 of them are intact after testing, which I believe is actually closer to 1 in 5.

Gelded colts and spayed fillies are the bread and butter of your stable. They make you money and except for a handful of hbs you might lose over the course of their lives in damages they don't cost you anything. They're a finite resource: one stall, for the life of the horse, can make you tens of thousands of HBs over the course of that horse's life. They DO absolutely contribute to the next generation because they help pay for breeding fees, testing fees, and buying new barns. If you have an upgraded account they're basically set and forget: autoshower does everything with them and you don't ever really have to think about them again.

Sure, your intact mares/stallions can do that too but they cost you more. Aside from the obvious, every year that a mare has a foal she costs you a new stall; if she gives you 15 foals over the course of her life, she fills an entire barn of the smallest available size by herself.

But yeah, like Ammit said, it's fairly rare for offspring to exceed their parents' breeding ability. Only 76 of my 981 are intact colts, who I know are better than their sires because of comparison testing. That's less than 1 in 10.

Don't lose hope though. Trust strict breeding advice, use comparison testing, and learn to be shrewd about your mares. You can usually tell after a couple of foals if they're an improvement over their dams or not, and even when they're not, they're still giving you show foals.

More horses = more money. I can't say this often enough. More horses = more money. My showing bonus was just shy of 850k this morning, which, yes, means I'm probably the 1% player, but there's no secret formula to getting there.