Filly or Colt?Filly Factors and Colt Factors Explained
Very few pedigrees are equally good for a filly or a colt. There are general rules about what makes a pedigree good, such as having full or 3/4 siblings is an excellent way to upgrade your horses, being almost a guarantee of outstanding performance. And having sex balanced line breeding unlocks the full potential of a target ancestor. The extensive research that has been done in the Thoroughbred Industry has turned up some interesting statistics. For it seems, depending on the sex of the ancestor that is duplicated and sex balanced, the result will be better for either fillies or colts. Through studying thousands of pedigrees the researchers were able to identify pedigree patterns that were consistently present in the best performance horses and the best breeding stock. They established that the better fillies and colts have pedigree patterns that differ from each other. The following is a outline of what they discovered: The statistics show, that good performance fillies or mares have multiple lines of daughters of superior sires, and both sons and daughters of an exceptional mare. These are called filly factors. Better performance colts and stallions have the opposite: multiple lines of a sons of a target mare, and sons and daughters of a superior sire. These are called colt factors. Things get more complicated with breeding stock. For producing excellent broodmares a pedigree goal would be to include the filly factors mentioned above along with some colt factors. The colt factors are seldom a problem, usually being there already, often too many of them. It is harder to get multiple lines of a mare because mares produce far fewer offspring than stallions. It is a very unusual mare that has more filly factors than colt factors, but ideally that is what you want to create for a good broodmare. The best mares have a high number of filly factors, plus a slightly lower percent of colt factors. For example,the phenomenal Holstein mare Tabelle, who was a mother to six stallion sons, had some very strong filly factors, especially in Ethelbert daughters and granddaughters. But she also had slightly more colt factors, as do most horses of both sexes. Maybe that has something to do with why her best progeny were colts:
Calypso I-V.
Good stallions have colt factors, and it was found that they needed added reinforcement in the background lineage, such as duplicate lines of ancestors of the sire line, and they also needed filly factors, once again a substantial amount but still less than the colt factors. (first published 2005 on Sport Horse America)
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