HGG Community Forums

I have several thousand show ponies and generally breed more replacements each season than I lose in rollover, so I cull 3 ways.

1) if I’m having a HUGE breeding season, I only keep gen 2 and bootstrap foals. For some reason, these are consistently my high point ponies when I sort my show ponies by all time points. My current top 25 earners are 18 bootstraps, 5 gen 2s and 2 gen 3s. All have more than 4k points.

2) if I need to make more space in the show barns, I sort by age and strip out every show pony 10 and up with less than 500 points. Discards go to auction. The exception to this rule is retired broodmares who have lived in pasture and therefore have low point totals. They have a home for life in my barns.

3) I have a nightly show bonus close around 450k, which definitely is enough to fund my breeding and testing each season. If I still need to make room, I’m likely to run a give away. I generally give away 10ish year old show ponies with close to 500 points. The other thing I will occasionally do if it’s close to monthly rollover is put up a bunch of my show ponies over the age out limit in a public buddy chat. It’s first come first served as a lottery for people to grab a handful of ponies and hope a few survive. This, however, usually means my show bonus takes a hard hit so it’s only for major breeding months when I think I can make up the difference fairly quickly with ponies aging up and making good show scores.

I keep trying to get faster at culling (I also have several thousand show ponies). My most recent method involved looking at all show horses over 9 years old.
First I found the average points-this-year for each age group (10yo, 11 yo, etc); then I separated out all of the horses who were below average points-this-year. Of the below-average horses, I again found the average of their points-per-year by age group, and discarded all show horses who were below THAT average.
It resulted in roughly a 30% cull of existing show horses. This method is easiest if you have access to the herd download feature (premium only).

I personally do not look at all-time points, because foundation horses can now be created with points. I prefer to download my herd at the end of each season and only consider points this year.

Cheers is not the only person I have heard say that 2nd gen horses are the best show horses - so from now on I may be discarding any 3+ generation foals that don't meet my breeding goals.

Bootstraps/high gen are far and away the best as a group (most of mine are in the 13-13.5 PT range but my few who are in the upper 13s are rock stars). But if you don’t have high PT bootstrap or upper gen ponies, keep your gen 2 10+ PT foals. My even lines always take a beating and I don’t have a large breeding herd over about gen 4, so my even bred upper gens never really make a big difference in my show herd.