HGG Community Forums

Yes, that is a confusing pair of related acronyms. :) Perhaps this will help you.

PT is the Performance Test which judges the training ability of a horse--how well and how quickly and how long it will train, and so approximately how far it can be expected to travel up the ladder of showing levels. See Showing/My Show Entries for a look at that.

AFPT stands for Average Foal PT score and it is a way of evaluating the breeding ability of a stallion or mare. With the Premium Upgrade (I think that's where it starts) this will be seen on the Family Tab of any mare or stallion that has at least one foal that has been Performance Tested. However, it is possible to compute this average for any horse by adding the PT scores of its foals together and then dividing by the number of foals.

This is helpful especially with mares, since we don't have a Comparison Test for them. So if you have 2 Red papered mares, each with at least three foals, you can figure out which one might have a higher breeding ability within the Red range.

Mare 1's foals: 9.9 + 10.2 + 9.8 = 29.9 divided by 3 = 9.96 AFPT
Mare 2's foals: 9.7 + 10.3 + 10.1 = 30.1 divided by 3 = 10.03 AFPT

However, you will also need to bear in mind the ability of the stallion(s) they have been bred to. The more foals a mare has produced, the more accurate the AFPT will be for predicting her exact breeding ability.

So, AFPT is for deciding what to do with a mare. It is the foal's PT score that helps decide what to do with the foal.

It's entirely up to you. Depending on what I'm breeding for and how many mares I'm putting in the pasture, I may use a single stallion. However, each stallion can only have 50 live covers in a season, so if you put between 51 and 100 mares into the largest pasture, it will take 2 stallions to cover them all, and even in the 60 acre pastures, if they are full of mares, there will be 10 that won't be bred if there's only 1 stallion in with them.

You could put 1 stallion in, breed as many mares as he can cover, then remove him and put a second stallion in to do the rest.