HGG Community Forums

So it 3 gen?

Previously, most players mainly checked to see that the visible pedigree (three generations before the horse in question) were even and made less of a fuss about what had gone before. This decision was made because at that time each of the great-grandparents' pedigrees had to be searched individually.

However, Ammit finally was able to make the "one document" pedigree available (which in the case of very long lined horses is still unwieldy). Then in an effort to trim down the archive records we had a massive purge of long-lined horses so that hopefully some of the "ancient" in game terms ancestors would have no "living" descendents and could be removed from the memory. She gave us a very generous incentive to encourage us to do this, and players cooperated very well in divesting themselves of horses that were descended from the earliest horses in the game (which at the time was about 9 years old, a long time to be collecting records of pixel ponies).

After that, players became excited about starting their own fresh lines and began keeping track of generations beyond the first four. There are still some long lined horses about that have considerable inconsistencies in their back pedigrees, but many of the veteran players and, I suspect, some of the newer ones, are concentrating on keeping even pedigrees as long as they are developing their lines. So the answer to the question is--some people are looking for horses that are even unto the 5th and 6th and greater generation, others are less fussy and don't look too far beyond the visible pedigree. It all depends.

When working toward increasing quality, the best strategy is to neuter all colts that paper and/or comparison test worse than or the same as (about as good as) their sires, only keep those that are superior to sires. Paper your mares as quickly as possible, so that you know as soon as you can which ones are better than their dams. If they paper the same as or less than, spay them. Then neuter the daughters of those less than optimal mares as well, since they will be behind the daughters that paper better than their dams. It isn't the length of the pedigree alone that increases offspring quality, it's the breeding quality of the stallion and the mare.

I'm not good at culling, frankly, and barn space is usually so short that there's no way I could breed all my mares regularly anyway. Lamentably few of my mares, especially in the higher generations, are papered. One good thing that has come out of the pastures for me is that those mares do get papered. Now I need to take the papered mares out and put in some that need it. *G*

Some people don't bother with even pedigrees after 4th gen, but plenty still do. Not sure I've seen anything past 7th gen so maybe some people give up about that point and have new lines coming up. I'm interested to see if I can get my even pedigrees up on the same quality of my old LB lines, of many generations!

I have some that breed show horses that I don't mind being all willy nilly. But everything else I try to keep even. I have horses up to 8th generation. Although I only have two mares of that generation currently.