Inbreeding

Inbreeding is precisely what it sounds like – breeding horses WITHIN a bloodline. 

When you go to breed your mare and select a stud, it will tell you where potential inbreeds are, and you typically want to avoid them.

In Photo Finish™ LIVE, any horse can breed with any other horse, but the closer you are to each other in blood relationship, the much higher chance of disastrous breeding results. Starting “above” the hypothetical foal, FOUR (4) generations are all checked to see if any share a common bloodline. If ANY match, then there’s a chance of penalties. The farther away the match, i.e., a shared great-great-grandparent, the less likely and lower the severity of a penalty. But sharing parents with grandparents or breeding with siblings is, of course, a much riskier affair!

As a hypothetical: when a horse is bred, the bloodline of 4 generations above the hypothetical foal is what can incur inbreeding penalties.

That means if Stud A and Mare B are breeding to make Foal C, then:

– Stud A
– his parents
– his Grandparents and
– his great grandparents

are checked against

–  Mare B
– her parents
– her grandparents and
– her great grandparents

for any shared blood. 

One question we have often seen is whether or not the penalties show up down the line. Notably, “already committed inbreeding” is not shown in the reports. Whenever the inbreeding occurs entirely in the Mare line for some, the Mare already has worse genes because of that inbreeding, so it does not “re-apply” to the Hypothetical Foal.

The investment could be worthwhile if you have 10 or more females, as it includes 100 free breed reports each month.