HGG Community Forums

I heard a rumor on the internet that Ammit is going to be making a post about this subject later, but in the meantime...

I am actually not really surprised by this, for a couple of reasons:

1: Strict breeding advice is now pretty strict indeed, and this is a good thing. You can be confident that the foals that got through SBA are stellar and will be fantastic additions to your breeding stock.

2: The more uneven the quality between halves of a cross the less likely you are to get intact foals. If you're breeding *Stars to regular foundations, you're looking at a 20% or greater difference in ability between sire and dam, and while you'd expect all of their babies to meet somewhere in the middle I don't think that is actually the case. Also, I believe Strict Breeding Advice now compares a foal to both of its parents, instead of just sire or dam, so if one parent is super fantastic the foals now have a higher standard to live up to.

3: If you take a look at http://hj2.huntandjump.com/pub_member.php?u_id=420 (you don't have to be logged in... scroll down to the barn column) you can see the results of Ammit's experiment, where she bred perfect foundation mares (not exceptionals) to a variety of stallions, ranging from a perfect foundation to a boosted-cloned-boosted (so 115% breeding ability) stallion, who is one breeding step down, still, from a *Star himself. There's also a huge random element at work; some years you just plain get more intact foals than others.

4: I've bred 83 foals so far this season and done my best to ensure even matching quality-wise, and of those 83 I only have 11 intact myself.


As far as red vs yellow mares... assuming you're talking about foundations, Yellow papers are the mare equivalent of C papers for stallions. Technically all regular foundation mares, even perfect foundations, are yellow quality. They're right at the very edge of yellow and red though and so randomly some of them paper red, but if they're just foundations (not exceptionals, not the RS HHs that create exceptionals) they're still only perfect 100% ability foundations.

Does that help at all?

I was hoping it wasn't just me with rotten luck, so your post does help! I'm fairly new and have not had a problem breeding to *Star stallions with foundation mares previously, and often got desirable foals.

I didn't know some randomly paper red. I thought Red were legitimately papered that way.

Thank you so much for your help. I was thoroughly bummed :)