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All must pass SBA.I decide first on papering. I have certain requirements for each generation.

2nd Gen: B or A, Red or Blue
3rd Gen: A, Blue
4th Gen: A or Star*, Blue or Gold*
5th Gen: Star*, Gold*

After that, if I have too many still, I decide on Inconsistent versus Consistent. Keeping Consistent or asking myself if it’s worth GMTing them to be Consistent, or if they’re worth keeping and not GMTing them.

Asking who the parents are and if I’ll ever get something like this again (are both parents still available, is this a cross I would want to repeat if I could, etc).

I don’t cull based on PT scores in my breeding line, only in my show horses. I only keep show horses above 10.30 at the moment, and that number is always going higher.

At first I bred whatever to whatever until I figured out my goals.

So what are your goals? The best part of this game is that there is no wrong answer to that question everyone can have their own goals and requirements.

You can choose to try to breed the highest PT horses (or the lowest), breed for the highest papers, or you can breed for the tallest drafts or the shortest ponies (or breed from one side of the scale to the other in the same line), or you can choose to focus on the bone weight and see how tall you can get a horse with the lightest bone weight (or the chunkiest midget pony)

And whatever you choose you can change your mind over and over again if you choose.



Culling (I only alter and throw into the show barns not get rid of) is super easy for me when I have a checklist. Foal doesn’t fit the requirement it gets snipped no ifs ands or buts.

But I’ve been around long enough and built up my herd so I can afford to be super strict on what I do and don’t keep because I average 800 foals a month (plus or minus a 100 or so).

First off I whole heartily believe in using all the testing you have available (especially anything free).

So I use strict breeding advice on all my foals first (from the barn page) so I don’t see any and think maybe I won’t test that one because it’s so perdy.

Next I breed for colour Grullo. So I gene test everything and use the search page to alter anything that isn’t E? aa D? Which is basic grullo genetics. Over the years I’ve started getting stricter on my studs and they must be EE aa DD

Then I PT test everything and alter any inconsistent foals

Previously I would then go through and add prefixes to all my intact mares and throw them into their breeding generations barn and then every few months go through and snip any low papering mares (I only keep the top 2 papers of any generation and the top paper if it starts to be the majority) but I just finished comparison testing all of my mares so they will continue on with the boys and be comparison tested to their Dam and superiors will earn their Prefix. And then all papered

The colts get papered and then I go through each stud and trim out the low paper foals and comparison test the rest (I only keep 1 paper level for each stud and weed the intact colts down to 3 superiors.) once I’ve comparison tested all the colts I will go through each generations breeding age studs and pick which will be in the pastures from the rest I will keep 3-5 of each particular gene I breed for (axiom RBG, Plaid, Nexus, KP) and cull the rest.

I have several goals.
1. Black non-cream based Appaloosas. So all red horses get culled. Then the rest are based on a combination of passed SBA, PT Score, papers. Finally if there are equally qualified horses and I don't have space, then it depends on the Appaloosa pattern.

2. My Snow Tiger line will be geared towards homozygous snowflake and homozygous tiger eye. I'm allowing red horses in that line for now as long as they pass all tests and carry the desired genes. Eventually I'll weed out the red there as well.