HGG Community Forums

It's completely personal preference. If you want your breed name to remain TOTALLY pure, or just don't want lower quality horses with your name on them (as the breeder) out there, or you want complete control of every mare a stallion gets bred to, or if you have a restricted gene (like Ice 7), or if you simply don't want to bother remembering to put you stallions up for breeding every season (like me!), or any number of reasons.

If you've sold from a line you will never be able to fully control whatever you've sold, but that's no reason you can't make the stallions from that line In House Only from this point forward.

I generally think of IHO in two situations.

A stallion may be IHO for breeding purposes, meaning that you do not stand him for public breeding nor do you sell straws. You may still sell his progeny though, but you have full control of what quality of direct offspring you sell because you can Paper and compare them yourself. You obviously do not then have control of those intact offsprings' descendents, though.

Or you may have an entire line that is IHO, meaning that you do not allow outside breeding of that line and you do not ever sell any of that stock intact (you may or may not still sell or auction desexed show ponies).

I think it is generally more common to have lines that are restricted to other breeders of that particular set of genes than to have them truly IHO, but I definitely know people who have had stallions truly IHO for breeding purposes. Most of my stallions were mostly IHO the further in to the game I got.

My big thing about in house is the fact of trying to sort which foals can be sold and where hey can be sold and which ones can't be sold altogether, Just make sure you don't make things too complicated to keep straight.