HGG Community Forums

Quality over colour, always!! Once you have the quality established, then you can add the fun elements of colour and flashy genes - it also makes your horses more desirable if they are even bred and of good quality.

Breed your horses to even quality studs/mares - C papered to a Yellow papered, B to Red, A to Blue and Star* to Gold*. If they are a generation or two out, I wouldn't stress too much, as this new breeding advice compares the foal to both the mare and stallion and will alter if inferior to one/both!

And make sure you use testing! If you're not upgraded, the best thing is the breeding advice; an upgrade adds the papering and comparison testing which is extremely helpful and premium can also get SBA (strict breeding advice).

Test and snip, test and snip - find your good eggs and bad eggs (so to speak!)

Flashy or expensive genes like pearl, satin, ice, kit M, S+ etc don't make sales, if the horse is poor quality or inferior to their parents! I breed with these genes, and I looove the results, but if the foal isn't good, then as much as it hurts, a snip snip is needed. It can be so sad to snip a pretty one/expensive baby but you'll always get another similar but of even better quality! Always keep in the back of your mind that flashy, fancy genes are only desirable if they are accompanied by the quality required to improve the horses that carry these genes rather than the quantity of these horses..

To answer your question about what genes look good together, I love DP (Dense Pheomelanin) which combined with Sooty genes (Sty) on red based horses (chestnut, palomino etc) can create livers and chocolate palominos. I also love Kit M and S+ - these two can be expensive to purchase a horse with (if the horse is good quality), but they're quite pretty!

I will show you the effect of DP on a Chestnut:

Chestnut - No Sty/DP

PF No Name

'Dark' Chestnut - Sty Sty/No DP

PF Molly

Liver Chestnut - StySty/One copy of DP

II Red Fox

'Black' Liver Chestnut - Homozygous Sty and DP

II Americana

I have a habit of writing essays lol, but I hope this information helped!