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When I get my foals in the barn, SBA test immediately without looking at them, without fail. It helps to lessen the initial blow, but it still hurts when you look at the snipped foals.

I totally agree, Flying Stunner!

And it really will, AHayesHorses.

I know I have a long way to go to get where you both are, but I want really good quality lines when I do get there. Eventually I'd love to get to the point where all my third Gen from C/yellow are A/blue and all my second generation from my exceptional lines are A/blue, and see how it goes from there. I would love star/gold by fourth/third, but I don't know if that's possible.

I just finished a big cull on HJ1. Still have some yearling colts to cut down but I’m letting them sit until I can go through my herd here.

I find the easiest way to cull is write down your goals and make your culling process into a checklist that you just work down. I’ve streamlined mine so that it doesn’t take me long when I actually sit down to do it even though the checklist I use is quite long lol. I do as much testing as I can using the bulk testing on the barn page before I even open the horses page. I also use the search a lot. I also find it super therapeutic snipping all the things lol more show horses mean more money for more foals or barns.

I breed consistent Grullos with white patterns. Each server has 2 special gene lines over the grullo.

Bulk test- SBA, performance and genetics
Cull - all non grullo and inconsistent
Bulk test- paper
Cull - C and yellow papers.

- Add prefixes for all mares left intact which indicates generation and which barns/ pastures she goes in.

- Sort mares into their barns (1generation per barn) and run through each barn sort by papers, snip lowest paper level leaving top 2 levels. Every third barn only has the top paper level left in the barn.

Using the search I open all the studs pages and look at the foal links.

-For nexus and ice studs I clear the altered boxes and put nexus or ice genes as must not have and I snip everyone on the list.

-Clearing the gene restrictions and clearing the mares I sort by paper culling the lower ones. Then I open all the colts without prefixes first and compare them to sire and record the Superior status in the notes or gens them if they are AGA or worse.

-Refreshing the search I compare the brothers against each other keeping AGA until a Superior brother comes then geld the AGA.

-I try to reduce them to 3 or less colts per stud. If there is still more than 3 after comparing the brothers I go to the only step that depends on my mood the day of. I cull the remaining by using one or more of the following:
- sort by PT and cull #4 down
- compare genes, homo preferred over het, kit genes preferred (especially double Kit as I breed KP on HJ1)
-Keep the top 3 preferred Kit genes
- snip all but the one or two horses that the picture is more pleasing to look at and therefore more likely to be picked in the future.

- Add prefixes to stud colts names and sort into barns.

- second run through of the barns to cull the bottom paper level below the top 2.

-send all the altered horses to the show barns. Add prefixes and tattoos to them when I have time.

My last cull on hj1 I went from 1400 intacts to under 1000. And the first day I went down to 140 colts and when I finished my checklist above I was down to 75. Then I opened the search and pulled up each generation and went through and culled them down to around 10 or less per generation finishing around 50 total. As I’ve said I still have a bunch of axiom colts to trim down.

Yes I need to do some culling too. I seem to have the biggest trouble culling my gen3s and 4s, gen3's especially. I've got a few red gen3's floating around I need to cull, but I still seem to have a million gen3 blues! Gen5 is easy as I can cull any blues that don't have anything that makes them special and just keep golds, once I have enough of the anyway
Stallions I'm pretty good at as they need to be superior to sire or at least meet my minimum standard for that generation. But I still end up with so many LOL, so not sure how good I am really!!
One of my problems I have no real colour restrictions, anything goes!!

My culling process is very similar to other's who have commented. My foundations are now only expros and excep perfects. The effect of this is slowly working through my lines. When I pull foals from a pasture they are put through SBA, PT, genetic and papering. At this point I spay/geld any gen 2s that are not blue or A, by gen 4 they must be star or gold. This occurs without ever looking at them. If I decide to keep them I will GMT them consistent if they are inconsistent. If I already have the equivalent stallion/mare, inconsistency will get them gelded or spayed.

All stallions remaining are comparison tested. Any that do not compare as good as or superior to my bench mark are gelded. In very rare occasions, mainly for special genes, I will boost a stallion until it is as good as the benchmark. Besides that I do not boost.

I have each line and generation of mares in their own pasture. When it is time to put the three year old mares in the pasture, the lowest AFPTs are removed and the new mares are moved in. This is slowly weeding out mares that did not paper at the same level I currently cull at. I put the best stallion I have in each pasture, and especially in my higher gens, mare lag drives a low number of foals that pass SBA, but for those that do each generation is slowly getting better.

My bootstrap pasture is run the same and is just a revolving door of mares based on AFTP. Again all mares must be consistent.

I have a gen 3 Star stallion that is from pure exceptional line breeding with no boosts.


3S0 E TopStar

Well, I am working my way through my colts/stallions. So far, I have cut 50-100 for being AGA or inconsistent, and I have a lot more to go. Then it will be on to the mares.

I SBA everything from my non-Bootstrapped horses. That is all the testing I do. I pick 2 or 3 stallions, at random, to remain stallions, then the rest are turned into mares. I haven’t comparison tested a stallion in quite some time, and I haven’t gotten a superior to sire horse in years. If a horse passes SBA it is good enough to be in my program. That being said I only have a 10% pass rate or so for my established lines so I don’t get too many horses.

My boot strapped lines just get cycled, as I run out of room the older mares get pulled out and replaced with younger mares and then they get spayed and thrown into the show barns.

I just went through this. My first step was setting a "quality bar" by preference. I kind of like a higher PT, so that's a trait I cull for (of course doesn't mean much in terms of breeding capability).

I also require G2 to be Blue/A unless special colors. G3 Blue/A. G4 Blue/Gold or A/Star. G5 Gold/Star unless I LOVE their genes.

Then I set a marker for PT as mentioned. 10.4PT G2, 10.8PT for G3 originally but I lean more towards 10.5PT G2 and 11PT G3.

I also culled off almost ALL of my plain colored breeding stock. I specifically breed for loud patterns by preference.

After that I culled off mares who were 10 years who hadn't given me ANY intacts while they had full pasture bonus. Then I dropped to 8 years. Too much turn around to hold onto mares not earning their keep. I also prefer my mare AFPT to be higher than their own.

Studs I ONLY utilize Superior to Sire. In order to better my chances I pair up Blue/A, Gold/Star, Red/B. I try to keep 2 studs around per group of mares.

As I progressed I developed a pasture system that is in need of expanding AGAIN. I organize like:
Foundation
G2 Gen + Wtc
G2 KP
G2 Ice
G2 SNF
(Need a G2 KP/SNF, G2 WW, G2 MU, and G2 CHN)
G3 Gen + Wtc (I'll probably need two more 30s in a few seasons)
G3 SNF
G3 KP
G4 Gen + Nex + SNF (I pulled all SNF this season to flush. I need two additional 30s I think here)
G4 KP
G5 Nexus (actually 2 pastures)
G5
G6
G7+

And now to try to cut down AGAIN, I've culled off all of my inconsistent breeding stock except for ONE girl I couldn't persuade myself to part with.

Going forward I'm beyond excited. Even with being extremely picky I ended up with 51 replacement fillies from this year!!! LOL

NEVER look at the foals period...not before and not the snipped ones after you run SBA! That's just adding insult to injury. I am much more at peace when I follow this rule lol! Then you can just be excited as each image pops up and you know they're keepers

Good thing I am doing a cull because I just found this beauty hiding in my barns! Hom Satin Blue papered 5g filly!

Well, I am making more progress! I pulled all stallions and 18+ mares from my pastures. Along with any yellow papered mares that are not foundations, I pulled all red papered 4g and 5g mares. I still need to resort my pastures, name horses, and finish culling inconsistent horses and my stallions. Ugh, back to grinding my nose through my mess of breeding horses.