HGG Community Forums

You need to be breeding by paper level not PT score. PT scores are not breeding ability and can't be used that way. Don't use PT to make breeding decisions. Comparison testing and breeding advice is how you get better horses.

@Ammit @HighstormFarm

That's just the thing, my top colts between 11.10A and 12.90 Star all got turned into geldings because they weren't good for breeding. Same for the fillies; 12.00 Blue to 13.70 Gold and again, they got spayed.

I always do comparisons with my stallions and always do all of the tests on every horse involved so i thought i had everything good to go.

Is it better to breed stallions and mares that are closer in PT score and the same equivalent of papering, with the mare being gold and the stallion having star for instance?

So I took a look at a few and it looks like most of them were from bootstrap lines. As a general rule of thumb, when they're that high of paper levels, you want to go easy on the BA until you know what to look for.

Here's the 13.7 filly in question, I think, if I found the right one (but if not she still makes a good example), and take a look at her paperings compared to her parents.


Golden Crypt

She's a *gold, while her mom is a **gold and her dad is a ***star. Those extra asterisks mean they're entire levels above her in quality. Her PT score is great, sure, but that just means she's going to make a really good show pony! Hang onto her, and now that she's snipped especially, if you make sure to train and show her every week, she's going to be making you thousands of points by the time she's older. Her papering is lower than both parents, which is why she was snipped. That's all BA and SBA look at, they don't compare PT at all.

Now, one important thing to note is that paper levels represent a range of quality, like blue might represent a made up number from 100 to 105 or something like that, so you can still get a foal who is the same paper level as the parents that gets snipped, like a blue foal from a blue/A cross. But if the foal is red paper from that same blue/A cross, then you definitely know it won't pass, while if it's *gold from that blue/A cross then it definitely will pass. (There's a couple niche cases where this may not be true but we're staying simple to get the right idea.). PT doesn't factor into that at all.

As for your question of if it's better to breed matching papers, yes, that gives you a better chance of them passing if you use SBA, but not BA, because BA wants to make sure it's good enough for that cross (so a red out of a blue/*star cross isn't enough but a blue out of a yellow/*star cross probably is). SBA, on the other hand, wants to make sure it's at least as good as (or very close to as good as) the highest parent. So a foal out of a red/*star cross would need to be a *gold to pass SBA, while if that foal was blue it might maybe still pass BA fine.

Thanks for posting those, that helps!

Vocal Huntress is an easy one, she's a blue out of a *star/*gold cross so that's a certain snip. She's worse than both.

Banded Strike is trickier, since by papering she looks to be the same, being a *gold out of a *gold/*star cross. However, the important thing to remember with her is that paper levels are not hard levels by themselves but actually represent brackets! So as in my example above, if the *star/*gold bracket was something like 80-90 (this is just a made up number for example's sake), what probably happened is that her parents were higher *star/*gold, like 89 and 87 or so, and she was barely inside the bracket, so like an 81. That's still worse than the parents even though you can't see it.

And really, the best thing to know is that it just happens! I believe at one point Ammit said there was something like a 25% pass rate for BA, so that would mean for every one foal that passes there's another three or so foals that don't, and that's just the average. Since it's a unique chance every time, it's entirely possible to just be unlucky and get dozens of low quality foals out of a cross before you get even one good foal. I also don't know if that 25% was with pasture bonus or not, but I do know that having mares get a full 30 days in pasture before breeding them increases the chance of the foals turning out good as opposed to hand breeding in barn, so keep that in mind, it'll help you in the future.

And, if, as you said, you bred 20 and got 5 to pass successfully, well... that's exactly a 25% pass rate! :D

No. Papering is far more complex.