Can you only successfully breed one gender of horse?

[Tammy Stawicki]

This admittedly started in another thread but I thought it warranted it's own discussion. I have realized today I am seemingly MUCH better at breeding female paints than male paints.

Some data to back this up.

Assuming my horses are remaining competitive I race most of my horses until 5. Looking at my 2-5 year old paints I bred 69 fillies out of 126 total. 55% so yes a bias towards fillies but not dramatically so. I currently have 12 homebred paints that are Steward's Cup nominated. 2 of those 12 are male. So 83% female. A huge overrepresentation given the raw numbers.

Speaking of the Steward's Cup I have won the race 8 times with homebreds. all 8 were females. If you expand out to my lifetime paint numbers 228 of the 402 paints I have bred have been female. So 57%. Again not a big enough female skew to explain the extreme skew when looking at success rates.

So where is this coming from?

Am I preferentially breeding females out of my best mares? I don't think so. Most of my breeding on mares I own is done randomly. With me only selecting gender to fix a skew (so if a mare had 3 or 4 colts in a row I might select filly or if my crop that year was showing a gender bias). Now I do admittedly select female on most mares I lease, but the majority of my paints are coming out of my own mares. Looking at my current homebred SC nominees all were out of my mares. Steward's Cup winners do contain some products of leases/swaps (3 out of the 8 wins came lease or swaps) but again 5 out of 8 were out of my mares and are still all female.

Indeed this female being better can be seen even looking at a single mare's offspring. Synchrony, one of my better middle distance producers, has 3 filly/mares and 3 geldings of racing age. Those 3 female offspring average ~$440,000 in earnings. The three males $58,000. Now admittedly one of the males is 2 but still that's a big gap. Another example Dashuri, one of my better sprint producers. Her female offspring average $450,700 in earnings (and that is with one of those females being hit with a random injury after only 2 starts), her males $22,240.

Is it just harder for males in paints??? Admittedly I was surprised to see paints tend to skew more male. So looking at the 2-5yo total paint crops 5284 out of 10891 horses were female, only 48.5% but still that isn't a huge skew.

So what gives? Why can't I breed good males? Is there anyone out there who can only breed good males and not good females? Would be curious to see other people's numbers.

[Rochelle Bos]

I have a bunch of promising fillies, but no colts. I think for me when I lease nice mares I make sure it’s a filly for future uterus use. Generally everyone else is random.

I also think the colt game is way, way tougher.

[Dave Trainer]

Jo breeds a lot of colts so that my have something to do with it lol.

Maybe your stallions have a tendency to produce better fillies. Even if you're breeding randomly that won't affect what the stud is better at producing.

[Jo Ferris]

Now admittedly the past several seasons I've gone VERY colt heavy, like 85%+ colt heavy. Generally if a horse is running well for me they'll run until 5-6 usually. With all the time in the world to gather some statistics on my barn, here goes. I will say I feel my barn is pretty good at both, I've had good males and females, though it does seem to come in waves where colts are better, then mares, then back to colts, ect... but after going though my history I really don't find a ton of evidence to support that other than the past few seasons which obviously are skewed to colts given that I kinda forced that, lol. I have noticed many mares tend to produce one gender better than the other, Flying Pebbles is one that comes to mind, much better at producing mares than colts, and Country Bell was a colt producer but I haven't noticed this with stallions, they seem to be fairly even, a few tend to be a bit better with one, A View to A Kill I think is the Paint stallion that has been most skewed to one gender being a brilliant mare producer but for the most part I feel stallions don't usually produce one gender better than the other and when they do it's not as big of a difference as it is when a mare is skewed to one gender.

For paints, as far as SC wins I've had 14 wins with 8 different horses, 5 mares, 3 colts. Win wise it's pretty even as well, 8 wins for the mares, 6 for the colts. Of the 8 winners, 6 were homebreds, 1 CAH (mare, 2 wins) and 1 bred by another player (colt, 1 win) leaving my homebred tally with 4 mares, 2 colts and total homebred wins being 6 for the mares, 5 for the boys. G1 wins are skewed more to the girls, I've had 21 total Paint G1 wins from 11 different horses, 8 homebred, 1 CAH (mare, 2 wins), 2 bred by another player (1 colt, 1 mare, 1 win each), 4 colts, 7 mares total with my homebred tally being 3 colts, 5 mares. Courtesy on Boone and FLD Raven who each have 3 G1 wins the total wins for each gender is more even, 9 wins for the boys, 12 for the girls and with the homebred total being 8 for the colts, 9 for mares.

Of my 25 SC nominated Paints I've only got 3 mares nominated, again though, I've gone very colt heavy the past few seasons. For reference I have 135 Paints in my racing barn, only 24 are mares, obviously that isn't going to be the best example so I'm going to go with some generalized stats from all the paints I've bred that have raced. I've had 1,137 Paints bred by me that have raced, 535 are mares leaving 602 colts (52.9%), of those I've bred 100 stakes winners, 52 are mares leaving 48 stakes winning colts. Of my top racers I've bred 3 millionaires, 2 mares, 1 colt. Of my top 10 earners I have 6 that are colts and 4 mares. Honestly looking deep into this I feel like my stable has a very even spread. If anything I will say that my best/winning-est horses have been colts, like FLD Raven and Boone, sure my highest earning horses are mares (Kissin' Frogs and She's Country) but they also raced FOREVER, both with over 30 starts. Boone I still feel is the best horse I've ever bred (no offence Rave!), just was in a time where purses were smaller. Looking at the stakes winners I've bred I do feel before I started going colt heavy I was breeding mostly great mares with horses like No Place Like You, Never Puzzle Faith, How She Rolls, Kissin' Frogs and Surprise Kiss all within 2 years of each other, the former 2 being 13 this year and the lather 3 being 12 now, so definitely had a mare's are better phase there.

Will be interesting to see the next few seasons as I've started transitioning back into a more balanced breeding practice with this yearling crop being about 60% colts. Though I honestly have enjoyed going colt heavy and will probably continue to shoot for 60/40 colt/filly ratio.

I always feel like a good colt is a lot harder to get, I feel like it always seems that there's only 2 or 3 good colts running at a time but it's normal for it to seem like there's 8 or 9 good mares at a time. Like with racing Rave and there was him, Prequell AND City Boy racing at the same time it's like "holy cow, so many nice colts!" (that was really fun), but with mares you can see like 6 great mares and it's just a normal day

[Tom Lin]

I feel I am in the same place with trotters. Lots of nice fillies, yet struggle to get a top colt. I have been increasing my colt foal % each of the last few years.
4yo - 49.6%
3yo - 47.0%
2yo - 48.3%
1yo - 54.0%
foals - 66.9%
My yearling crop shows more colts in the TOP 50 trainers but the again the top trainer is a filly.

[Laura Smith]

Not mixers specifically, but I had 10 or so years where it seemed like the only homebreds I ever had running in the SC were fillies. I consciously started breeding more colts from my nice mares (harder than it sounds!) and for a couple years I did have more decent colts. This year's yearlings... well, seven of nine stakes TBs are female. So the SIM gods are laughing it up at me. First world problems, though, am I right?

[Rochelle Bos]

Just checked my yearlings:

15 stakes+ TBs 4 are colts (and 3 of those colts are DR lol)
6 stakes+ paints and 3 are colts! 50%, nice

[Polk Buffalo]

I have 6 paints 2yo nominated for SC. 4 colts and 2 females. Small sample. All are bred using the random button.
My guess is random, or maybe I am an unaware coltbreeder?