Data Analysis as a Crucial Piece of the Stallion Selection Process

(OR IT SHOULD BE!!!!!!!) By: Kylee Dunn

Part 1. Why am I taking my time to do this? If we were to look back at some of my pairings throughout

the years of exclusively breeding KFPS Friesian horses, I would probably make entirely different

selections now. This isn’t because we haven’t had success, we have had multiple champions of the day,

home bred, home prepped mares make star. It has been a very rare occurrence that we have ever taken

a horse to a keuring and not brought home some type of championship ribbon. I must admit though,

that knowing what I know now, there was a bit of luck involved in that. Don’t get me wrong, we

produced spreadsheets crossing our mares with every single stallion North America in order to help

make our choices, but it was still nothing in comparison to what we know now.

This won’t be a discussion on specifics of mares or rarity of blood or temperament. This is one single

source of the information you should use in conjunction with other things in order to make your choices.

This will focus exclusively on KFPS approved stallions. We did an unreal amount of data analysis on

stallions before choosing which stallion to import. Look, we know Uldrik 457 takes pretty pictures. Don’t

make your sole stallion choices off how pretty they are, or how much hair they have, or the fact that you

cuddled one once, or how nice they looked at the stallion show. The breed deserves better than that,

and I hate to tell you, but as North Americans we have an even larger responsibility because we don’t

always receive the best quality stallions. It is our job to sort through and discover which horses are the

best quality suitors for our mares. Education is the answer to improving the quality of the horses we

breed. Choosing a stallion should be of a bit of a balance between left and right brain thinking…. yes, the

feeling and emotion is important…yes, the data is important.

I am going to show you how to access the data. I am going to point out some things that you might want

to look at or consider. What you want to look at may be different than what I would look at and that just

depends on your own breeding goals. I am not going to make suggestions on stallions, and I am not even

going to include the names or pedigrees of stallions I am going to discuss. I have a random pool of

stallion data that I have pulled directly from the KFPS site. The data will include stallions in North

America, in other countries, dead, and alive. It really will be your own responsibility to do your

independent research once I show you what to look for.

Don’t get distracted by pretty pictures!!!!!!!!!! Left is by Samantha Dawn, Right is by Karin Sevink

Part 2. How do we access the data? Some of you might not need this portion. You may already know

how to get to the statistics, or it isn’t terribly difficult to find with a minor amount of searching. Feel free

to skip ahead to part 3 if you know how and where to find the stallion data we will be using.

Totally simple, go to the FHANA website at www.FHANA.com. Click log in.

If you know your username and password issued by the KFPS please enter it now. If you do not have

your username and password, please request your username and password by clicking the button

indicated by the lovely salmon colored circle.

Once you have successfully achieved login you will reach this page, and look, there are those lovely

salmon perhaps carnation? colored circles again. Both circles will take you to the same location…the

“treasure,” as I like to call it. This is your gold mine of stallion data. It is absolutely yummy that your

registry collects so much information for you to mull over. Use it!

We have arrived! Welcome to the Thunderdome!

As you can see, each stallion is listed by letter, so you would select the first letter of the name of the

stallion you are looking for, followed by selecting the name of the stallion and you have hit the

proverbial jackpot! Here is the kicker…examining the data of just one stallion is going to do very little for

you. What you really need to do is compare several stallions in order to understand where that stallion

might fall in conjunction to the others. This is why you need this data…..Not every stallion produces the

characteristics that they possess. A horse competing highly in sport does not indicate necessarily that his

offspring will compete highly in sport. A horse with a big trot or refined bone may not pass on the traits

he carries…..this is why stallions had been disapproved on offspring testing results. You can learn

whether they do, or they don’t generally speaking pass on the traits you are looking for, just by doing a

little research.

Part 3. Ok! So, we have clicked on the stallion of our choice. The very first page that I want to look at is

BREED REGISTRATION. I am purposefully not disclosing the stallion being used as the example. I merely

chose this stallion so we can dissect the pieces of this page. While all the data is important, I am only

going to talk about the things I find the most important. You might find other pieces important. If you

think something is important that I haven’t mentioned, don’t discount it! We all have different breeding

goals and agendas for breeding. No one person has all the answers. The data is there for you to use to

your advantage.

Alrighty, let’s start with the giant red rectangle!!!! This is the number of breedings done by this stallion

by year. This is important for a few reasons. This can indicate the popularity of the stallion. Did the

stallion remain popular because the offspring were quality as adults? Did he show himself well at the

stallion inspection during a particular year? Was he competing at high levels of sport? Were his offspring

better than anticipated, worse than anticipated? Why did a stallion’s popularity decline or why was he

never popular in Holland at all? Were there fertility issues? Many things can impact these numbers.

Were the owners not properly marketing him? These numbers can point out to you that you need to do

further research. Make sure you consider their age, stud fee, and location. You may see a drastic change

in numbers if a stallion changes location or changes the cost of his stud fee. Look beyond the stallion

that you are considering and look at the trends of the other stallions as well. You will need to compare

all of this data to the data of other stallions in order to put it all into perspective.

Why don’t I really care about the foal results? Honestly, I have seen 3rd premium foals become approved

stallions and 1st premiums end up in the studbook. For me, I am more interested in their development

into adulthood than I am about how they looked as foals. Foals can be finicky. Perhaps they were too

afraid to show out that day. I suppose if you wanted to break these down into percentages and then in

to percentages for each and every stallion you might be able to conclude something of substance, but

for me, there are more important things to key on…. like gold stars!

Gold stars are some of the things I like to key on. Ster mare percentage is a big one for me. This tells you

what percent of the adult mares presented go on to make ster. The lower it is, the lower your chance

may be for your mare to achieve ster. The higher it is, the better your chances are of producing ster

quality horses! There are things to consider with this too. Is the data pool for a stallion even large

enough to make a real conclusion? The more data you have to work from, the higher the probability

that your data will be more conclusive. We are going to skip down a few stars and look at the number of

ster geldings and ster stallions. Genetically speaking some stallions will produce better quality in one

gender, so make sure you are considering the results of their male offspring as well as their female

offspring. As for model, crown, preferant and prestige, this will tell you a bit about how their offspring

are maturing beyond the three to four-year mark. Are they consistently producing offspring that are

achieving the highest levels in conformation and movement? Or how about our special little 3 gold star

item…. how well are their offspring competing in sport? Remember, just because a stallion is competing

at a high level himself, does not always mean that they are passing those abilities on to their offspring.

Perhaps you aren’t interested in ster percentages at all, perhaps you are breeding specifically for sport.

Some categories may be more important to you than others. Not every breeding goal is the same. You

also need to remember that several of these gold star areas can be impacted by the age of the stallion. If

you are looking at a young stallion you can’t expect high numbers in sport or other predicates because

some predicates are a bit age dependent.

Green rectangle, this one is fairly self-explanatory. Do you care about how much white a stallion is

throwing? Do you care if it is allowable or unallowable white? Will it impact the sale value of your foal,

or is it a moot point for you? Look at the percentage of what other stallions are throwing to determine if

it would be considered a high amount of white. Some stallions are sold because they produce a lot of

white and that would impact their breeding numbers.

I hope that I haven’t bored you to death by just the end of page one because there is a lot more data to

investigate lol. The biggest thing that I want you to take from this piece is to COMPARE, COMPARE,

COMPARE!!! None of this data means a whole lot until you look and see how it compares to the same

data of other stallions. You might find that some stallions are strong in some areas and weak in others.

You will just have to determine what gives you the best overall picture of what you are looking for.

When I initially did my analysis for my own personal use, I printed out every stallion in North America.

I made notes on the positive traits and negative traits for each horse. I reached out to people and asked

questions. Doing the work is a piece of being a responsible breeder.

Let’s look at an example of comparing stallion data for a few categories. Random selection of stallions.

You should do this kind of comparison with a much larger data set and for each category and then you

can decide which stallion checks the most boxes for your mare. (Of course, with also considering genetic

testing, inbreeding coefficient, and relationship percentages). Alright, so check it….20 different

stallions…20 different ster mare percentages. Look at how much they vary and that is just one tiny

sample.

Now check out these UNALLOWABLE white numbers. Same 20 stallions in the data set. From just these 2

things you can see how likely you are to have a foal with unallowable white, or how likely you are to

produce a ster quality mare offspring. I would love to articulate more information for a few more

categories to compare but it would be unfair as so much depends on age, and breeding numbers. I

would have to create specific data sets with similar traits and that wouldn’t really allow me to move

along to other pieces of importance. Maybe, I can circle back to that of a later date if there is enough of

a response but lots of maths…ugh.

So what did we see here…. sometimes you sacrifice a little bit of a chance for white for a bit higher ster

mare percentage or vice versa. Look at all of the categories but consider age and breeding numbers for

the remainder.

Stallion

1 Stallion

2 Stallion

3 Stallion

4 Stallion

5 Stallion

6 Stallion

7 Stallion

8 Stallion

9 Stallion

10

Ster Mare % 24% 64% 31% 52% 32% 46% 29% 40% 27% 57%

Stallion

11 Stallion

12 Stallion

13 Stallion

14 Stallion

15 Stallion

16 Stallion

17 Stallion

18 Stallion

19 Stallion

20

42% 39% 36% 47% 42% 42% 49% 27% 23% 28%

Unallowed Stallion

1 Stallion

2 Stallion

3 Stallion

4 Stallion

5 Stallion

6 Stallion

7 Stallion

8 Stallion

9 Stallion

10

White % 0.60 0.90 2.50 0.60 2.10 0.60 1.50 1.50 1.50 3.30

Stallion

11 Stallion

12 Stallion

13 Stallion

14 Stallion

15 Stallion

16 Stallion

17 Stallion

18 Stallion

19 Stallion

20

0.20 0.40 3.30 1.20 2.00 5.70 3.30 6.80 11.30 0.90