We all seek to find that perfect jack for our breeding programs. For many, color, size, conformation, temperament and pedigree are the most important criteria used to select our studs, but individual breeders may vary with the importance they place on each characteristic.
After the ideal breeding jack is selected, working with him to obey commands in halter is an important step in building mutual respect. When the time comes you will need his cooperation for hand or pasture breeding. Your hope is that he will behave reasonably well without excessive aggression towards your jennies. I try to discourage bad behavior early on. Personally, I have the best results by hand breeding my jennies, then putting them in the pasture with the jack. I sometimes do a combination of hand and pasture breeding, depending on the jack and jenny. My experience has been the jack is much happier with companions in his pasture so I usually keep him with a few bred jennies. I find he is much less likely to bray and pace, and is less aggressive when breeding. A month or so before foaling, I remove the pregnant jenny to a pasture with companions where a foaling stall is readily available.
Well-mannered, sweet jacks have always been a priority in my herd. Extremely aggressive, unpredictable jacks which I am not completely comfortable handling do not stay in my program, regardless of other qualities they may possess. I believe some of those undesirable characteristics are passed on to foals and, like a conformation flaw, I choose not to perpetuate that trait.
Now that your jack is trained, well-mannered and successfully breeding your jennies, is he producing the kind of foals you hoped for? Of course, we assume the jennies he is breeding are also excellent quality. Are the foals consistent? What colors are you producing and with which color jennies? Are the legs straight and wide? Are the heads nice and proportioned to the body? Is the animal well-balanced? Are the same pairings of jack and jennet producing the same quality animal year after year? Is the size at maturity as predicted? Does a birth height of 21" mature out at 31"?
As the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. Is your star jack producing beautiful foals?
I recently asked myself some of these questions, having felt reasonable good about my selection of foals as potential herd sires. How had they matured as adults? I was particularly interested in conformation, size, color and personality. It was fun to talk with people who had purchased my foals as potential studs, but it would be even more helpful to have documentation of their development. I decided to design the following form for this purpose to send to previous buyers. This information should be useful in predicting foal production data and future herd management.
(Form is coming!)
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