How not to Inbreed and Other Questions

[SweetClover]

Hey all,

I breed mustangs, and I'm running into a problem where I can't keep COI down for the life of me. I originally did not worry about this and I bred my mares to my best stud regardless of shared parentage. This was working alright for a while and I was getting a pretty high amount of greens in my breeding reports...and then all my horses started to look like very stubby mules. No.

So! I bred a lot of non-mustang blood into my herd (I was trying to get LP in there too, so that helped.), and currently I feel like I have a good amount of diversity. I'm also trying to breed some new mustangs from scratch as well.

Anyway, I'm looking for any advice on how to avoid the ugly-COI-genes as I breed back down to pure mustang. Help?

[Kintara]

Inbreeding doesn't necessarily make them ugly, just that your horses must have been a bit like that anyway and the inbreeding concentrated it! Hard to avoid some inbreeding though, just have to keep starting new lines to breed in

[Argent II]

COI and attractiveness have nothing to do with each other; 95% COI and still pretty attractive: http://www.horseworldonline.net/horse/profile/179225. As Kintara said, your program probably just concentrated a collection of unattractive physical genes while you were improving your breeders' reports. I had something similar happen; I ended up with stubby, heavy cow-things, like this one http://www.horseworldonline.net/horse/profile/216412. If you have a particular stallion or mare you like the look of, I'd keep more of their foals to shift your herd in that direction.

[SweetClover]

Yeah, that's basically what I was ending up with, except I started to have upright manes crop up as well as general cow-ness. (I'm still working on getting rid of the gigantic ears...)

Good to know COI doesn't directly correlate with unpleasant shape...that helps my plans quite a bit. Thanks for the advice! Hopefully I will make better selections this time around.

[Randi Potos]

I did this with my Traks. I was too focused on breeder report and ended up with a bunch of downhill giraffe looking things. xD I rehomed most of them and chucked the project. I could have improved the line but I already had too many other breeds to focus on.

My TBs, Hanos and Holsteins all have high COIs, and most of them are quite nice looking. As others have said, COI doesn't inherently cause poor conformation. The act of inbreeding on it's own is neutral but it can concentrate characteristics throughout your herd. Both good and bad.