Horse breeders comments

[Midway90067]

I was reading through Larissa's awesome guide on understanding breeders reports and conformation, which has some really awesome information, definitely recommend LOL. However, I did have one question:

Can any breeders comment be improved in a line of horses without adding outside blood, just through selective breeding, regardless of where the stats started out? In other words, say I have a line of horses that I want to have positive strength comments on. We are talking about a high COI lineage, that is currently sitting at anywhere from bad to average strength comments. Is it at all possible to breed these horses and see an improvement of these comments over time through selective breeding? Or is it a "waste of time" to try to improve this.

I have this question because I currently have a line of warlanders, its currently an AC only project. I don't know exactly what generation it is, but its well over 5 now, and the GP has been in the 40ks for a couple generations, starting to see get more 45ks. These horses are also performing pretty well in competitions, and I am definitely seeing improvement in testing scores, even without seeing improvement in the strength comment. Now in my question, I did ask if comments can be improved without adding any outside blood, but I have introduced some new colors using AC horses a couple of times, so occasionally I do bring in some "new" genetics. I don't do this often enough to consider it a consistent inflow of genetics variation.

Anyways, I am really fighting with strength at this moment, although I will say, I am starting to see some of the "with training" or "cannot be sure, but" comments, which are a step up from when I was consistently getting the "won't be renowned" comments. My other comments have all been going swimmingly. I am to the point where I am consistently getting very positive tempo and balance comments (with some greens here as well), and for the most part I am getting very positive comments for movement, but I never see anything worse than "average". But strength is a stubborn one.
To be honest, I have always found strength to be a difficult comment to improve, not sure if its just me here LOL. Even in my old TB lines, strength was always hit and miss. Strength is infuriating for me because I feel like it just sits on the fence more often then the other stats, the only other stat I can say this for is movement. Once I get a break through with things like balance, agility, speed, and intelligence, they tend to be pretty stable.
I will say, this is my first time breeding horses entirely from scratch, so there are a lot of things that I do not have experience with, so perhaps I just need to be patient. But as I said, strength is something I have struggled with in nearly all of my lines. I also don't want to practice patience with this just to later discover it was not do-able.

And another related question: If COI is high but I am occasionally introducing additional genes from the AC center, will I experience a drop off in development? More specifically, is it likely that I will reach a point where I can no longer get the genetic potential to increase? I don't personally care a ton if I lose color variation, I find I lose a little variation over time regardless since color variation is not (that I know of) linked to the horses performance, and I only consider comments and performance when I selectively breed. I however don't really want to hit stone wall when it comes to GP.

As of right now, despite having high COI I am seeing an increase in GP, so I have not hit any walls yet. I tend to look at the GP of each working generation as an average, and have seen a consistent upward pattern of about 1k GP each generation, which has barely fluctuated at all. I don't breed any super low GP horses (unless they have else something I am looking for), and if I have an exceptionally high GP horse, I keep them unless they perform really badly when compared to the rest of that generation. I have however seen a drop off in color variation.

[Argent]

It depends entirely on what genes are hiding behind those breeders' reports. If you've set low strength traits into the herd, it won't improve. Depending on how long its been a high COI herd, you're likely stuck with what you have, to a degree. There's potential for horses to pass on genes slightly above or below their actual genes, but that's a slight chance. COI has nothing to do with GP, and you should decide if your priority is GP or sport-specific traits (mov/tmp/bal/str seem to be your focus) since these do not have much to do with each other in terms of success. Movement and Strength have somewhat conflicting conformation needs, so that's a factor in the difficulty of progressing both

[larissar]

When stat genes are passed on to horses there is always a small random mutation in the value, it could go higher or lower. So even with a fixed herd, it will always be possible to reach higher stats over generations, it just gets much harder to do.