Where do I find videos of the stallions' gaits?
Hi!
How lovely that you are thinking about breeding a foal from your mare.
The first thing to ask yourself when planning a foal is what qualities you want the foal to have. The second is to consider whether the mare you are thinking of breeding matches those wishes. The stallion can both reinforce and compensate for the mare's qualities, but only half of the foal's genes come from him.
I am wondering what you are hoping for in your future foal. Since you mention gaits quite a bit, is it mainly dressage you are interested in?
You can find a good deal of important information about stallions in the SWB-aveln (Swedish Warmblood breeding programme) on the website blup.se. Here is a link to the stallions' page on that site: https://www.blup.se/sv-SE/rank/stallion/comp_jump/desc
Depending on which stallions you are interested in, some may be old enough to have already produced many offspring that are now adult. In that case it is more reliable to look at the stallion's offspring than at the stallion himself, to learn how his progeny turn out.
Many young horses are also shown at what are known as unghästbedömningar (young horse evaluations), where the horse's conformation, gaits and jumping ability are assessed and described. All the results are combined with those of other relatives, and from this you can work out something called a breeding index. The breeding index shows how a stallion's offspring turn out compared with other horses in the breed, or are expected to turn out if he is a young stallion. On blup.se you can click on "breeding index" and see how the stallions' offspring have turned out compared with other horses in the same breed. Around 90 to 110 is the average. There are also descriptive indices, which do not tell you what is good or bad, they simply describe the offspring.
On your question of whether the scores match reality, I would say that they do. The grading does shift over time, though. If you look at a stallion that was assessed long ago and was considered an 8 or a 9 then, he is probably not regarded as quite so good today. This is because the horses in the breed have improved, so the scale has, in effect, shifted upwards.
Good luck!
