What's in Your Mare's Stocking?
Written by Ian Tapp | Dec 16, 2010 |
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I'm sure many of you TrueNicks readers are in the midst of your holiday shopping, looking for the best gifts for the important people in your lives. But what about your broodmares? If you're on the farm with your mare, perhaps she'll get an extra flake of alfalfa and a handful of peppermints. As sweet as this is, the best gift might be the one that assures your mare's best chance of success—the right stallion choice.
Our most popular report (especially this time of year in advance of the breeding season) is the Broodmare Analysis Report. The report is designed to help you narrow down your stallion choices. You pick up to 50 stallions, and the report ranks them by:
- TrueNicks rating—tells how much better (or worse) the cross's stakes winner strike rate is than average, given the strike rates of sire and broodmare sire lines
- Broodmare Sire Improvement Index—tells specifically how much the sire improves the stakes winner strike rate of the broodmare sire
The report also includes individual TrueNicks reports with five-cross hypothetical pedigrees for each potential mating.
To help breeders qualify the strength of each cross, the top horses bred on the cross are listed in each TrueNicks report. You may find that an A rated cross has yet to produce a stakes performer at the graded level. Meanwhile, a B+ cross may have produced a graded stakes winner despite the overall strike rate being slightly lower. Such factors necessitate the breeder's intelligent interpretation of the data.
The overall goal of TrueNicks is to help answer the question of "To which stallion is my mare best sent?" We recommend B+ or better ratings in general, though there are certainly instances where lower ratings are eclipsed by other compelling factors, such as physical attributes of sire and dam, pedigree patterns, inbreeding and line breeding, and commercial considerations.
A mating that amounts to a C rating is statistically average. In this case, the mating is expected to produce stakes winners at a rate no greater or less than the averages of sire and broodmare sire. Of course, the C rated mating still might produce an exceptional horse, but statistically your mare is better suited to visiting a stallion that returns a higher rating.
To see the Broodmare Analysis Report in action, here are some examples:
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