HGG Community Forums

I very rarely unalter my mares. Breeding advice (or my own hand) spayed them for good reason! When I do unalter, it’s because they are very important to my breeding program, and they bring a vital, irreplaceable improvement. It has to be a mare that I cannot replace or find for sale elsewhere. Spending 250k on a GMT to unsnip means 250k less for more barns, other GMT work, buying horses, etc.

This is how I would analyze her. * My method is not better or worse than your approach, it is just what works well for me. Please don’t take it as “this is the only way to determine a horse’s worth as an intact breeder.” *

The way I would approach this mare: she has placed first in two shows that actually start to give a measure of her talent. Good start, definitely, but let’s reanalyze in 6-10 months from now. A lot can happen as the classes grow. Even my very best, repeatedly-earned-year-end-Breeder’s-Club-ribbons show horses do not always place first.

All her 1L classes with only two entries (her foal classes) are literally coin-flip levels of luck, and 2L is not much more skill-based with only three entries. I call winning at the low levels like that: “medium fish in a little pond.” It looks pretty to see all those firsts, but winning at the low levels may not be an accurate indicator of exceptional talent later on.

If she DOES continue to place first in every class, why not give her the best opportunity possible to shine in the show arena? (Aka, keep her spayed.) If she starts to falter in big classes, then she will need all the altered bonus help she can get (aka, keep her spayed).

And then I have the SO PRETTY! factor to consider. Yes, this mare is gorgeous. But is she irreplacably unique? No. I found this Blue-papered bootstrap mare of similar genetics (liver with splash) on the public forum for 3500. (Aka, keep her spayed.) That is one example of several liver mares currently available for public sale. The auction will have several more. You could buy SEVERAL nice breeding stock livers for that 250k needed to unalter her. (Aka, keep her spayed.)


Lvr spl prl x kp 43g sba

End result: This mare didn’t give me one good reason to unsnip her. Each potential reason to unspay her was answered with an alternative solution.

IMO, you made an excellent call by deciding: “this mare’s statistics are not good enough to stay in my show herd. She will shine in my show herd, and I can breed a horse that looks this again, but with even better numbers.” I would stand by your original decision, and save your GMT for something even more special : )

Also, keep in mind that how well a horse will place in a class has very (very) little to do with their breeding ability.

Let's say that a parent has X amount of "quality points" that they give to their foals. Let's say 100% breeding ability, and they give right in the middle of their range of total quality. However 60% of the "quality" goes towards the breeding quality of a foal, and 40% goes to the showing ability. So the horse has somewhat poor showing ability, but somewhat good breeding ability. However, you can still look at a parent's breeding ability by their AFPT, even if an individual foals PT is poor.

I'm sorry that's a really horrible example, I'm probably just made it more confusing sorry.

But another way to look at it, as I know a Star parent who produces a 13PT foal that won every single class, but had failed paper. So PT just simply doesn't cover the whole picture, and how well they place in classes at the beginning of their year doesn't really make a difference at all.

I had another point I was going to make, but forgot what it was. Sorry.

Yeah, breeding ability and PT are semi-related at higher gens, but not as much as you might think!

So to start, breeding ability (what determines paper level as well as how "quality" they are) is expressed in percentages. A perfect foundation (such as a C/yellow papered rank special or even just the perfect foundation herd helper) will have 100% breeding ability. An exceptionally perfect/exceptional producer (B/red papered foundation) has 105% breeding ability.

With boosting (1% or 5% boost), we can determine where a couple more numbers are:

- by boosting a perfect foundation 1%, we can change their papering from C/yellow to B/red. Thus the division from C/yellow to B/red is the 100% to the 101% mark.

- by boosting an exceptional producer 5%, we can change their papering from B/red to A/blue. Thus the division from B/red to A/blue is 109% to 110%.

So 101% to 109% is B/red, 100% to somewhere below that is C/yellow, 110% to somewhere (possibly 119% based on the range of B/red) is A/blue, and above that is star/gold.


While we know for certain that papering is an indication of breeding ability (the higher that percentage is, the better), we also know that AFPT is an indicator - but PT itself isn't.

So what does that mean?

AFPT stands for Average Foal Performance Test, or Average Foal PT for short. In other words, out of all the foals that horse has had, it's the average of all the PT tests of those foals.

Since we're told that AFPT is a fair measure to cull horses by (as long as the breeding conditions are as equal as possible and you have at least a few foals on the ground), we know that AFPT is, in fact, a measure of breeding ability. The higher the AFPT, the better producer (the higher percentage) a horse is.

However, we have also been told that PT itself is not an indicator of the breeding ability of a horse. That means the PT score is not in any way tied to the breeding ability of the horse - it's tied to the breeding ability of the parent.

Given that, we can therefore say that when two horses are paired, their breeding abilities are used to calculate the breeding ability of the foal - and their breeding abilities (possibly combined with their PTs, no telling) are used to calculate the PT of the foal.

Both are randomized within a range - so maybe horse X and Y can give their foal a breeding ability somewhere between 106 and 115%, and a PT score of somewhere between 10.3 and 11.5.

The key here - both numbers are randomized. So the foal might have a 106% and an 11.5 PT (barely better than an ExPerf but with a nice PT) or it might be a 115% with a 10.3 (an assumed mid A but with a PT score worse than some ExShows). It might also be somewhere in the middle, so perhaps a 109% with a 11 PT, or any other combination thereof.

Hence, PT does not correlate to breeding ability of the horse, even though it correlates to the breeding ability of the parents.

Where AFPT becomes useful is in determining smaller differences - a horse that can throw from 10.5 to 11.5 will theoretically (given enough foals and fair comparison, as pasture bonus among other things can change that) have a lower AFPT than one that can throw from 11 to 11.9, even though they can both throw, say, an 11.3, because statistically speaking they with throw an equal number of high end of the range foals as low end of the range foals, which averages out. So even though both are papered B/red, you can determine one is higher within that 101%-109% range than the other, since that percentage number correlates to how high of a PT they can throw.