FREE True Nicks Reports are Now Available for all Oakhurst Stallions. We are pleased to announce that we have enrolled all our stallions with True Nicks. Thus you can now run free nicking reports for all your mares to GRINDSTONE, BAQUERO, and our exciting new stallion UNDERSTATEMENT.

We chose True Nicks over the other nicking programs because: 1. True Nicks utilizes the largest thoroughbred data base from The Jockey Club's equineline.com, 2. True Nicks is closely affiliated with industry leader 'The BloodHorse Magazine', and 3. We like the comprehensive information that comes with each True Nicks report.

In recent years nicking has become extremely fashionable. One of the first questions that many mare owners ask us is "How does my mare nick with your stallion?" Well, now you can find that answer quite easily.

Nicking is FUN, especially when your mating receives a high grade, but I strongly encourage you to use nicking as just one tool in your breeding decisions. Most important you should always carefully consider the individuals you are mating -- because their conformation, their body type, their performance and produce records are much more likely to determine what quality of foal you will end up with than does a simple nicking grade.

I have always argued that the biggest flaw in nicking is that the grades are created based on only a very small number of individuals in the pedigree. True Nicks and eNicks both make their grades based exclusively on one individual in the stallion's sire line over one individual in the mare's sire line. True Nicks requires that at least 15 individuals have been produced from the specific sire-line/broodmare sire-line cross before assigning a rating and in order to do so may have to go back a few generations to find them. As a result the rating grade might be based on your prospective foals paternal great-grand-sire over its maternal great-great-grand-sire in order to be statistically significant. Such a nicking grade is based on just 18.75% of the pedigree while completely ignoring the other 81.25% of the pedigree. True Nicks tells you what sire in the sire line and what sire in the broodmare sire line the cross is rated on. The closer in the pedigree these are the more reliable/useful a certain nicking rating might be.

Also the nicking programs totally ignore the contributions to the pedigree made by all the females. Yet, leading breeders will always tell you that the female side of the pedigree is by far more important than the sire's side. This is because the mare contributes the all important X-chromosome, purported to be responsible for heart size, and the mitochondrial DNA which ultimately energizes the cells.

One shortcoming of nicking is illustrated in the following example. When mating Grindstone to a daughter of Swiss Yodeler, 'Misyodl', True Nicks rates the mating as a D. Not very good. The rating was made based on the prospective foal's paternal grandfather, Unbridled, over its maternal great-great grand-sire Damascus. Looking carefully we see that 'Misyodl' is out of a Slewpy mare. Now if we were to simply put Slewpy as the paternal instead of maternal grand-sire (such a mare is 'Wings of Slew', by Gray Slewpy out of a Desert Wine, by Damascus, mare) the True Nicks rating is an A++. So maybe there is still merit in mating Grindstone to Misyodl.

Another thing we noticed with our switch to True Nicks from eNicks was that while most of the grades were similar some were drastically and disappointingly different. Such as our Storm Cat line mares mated to Grindstone are A+++ with eNicks but only Cs with True Nicks. This is because eNicks places emphasis on the stakes-winners a given cross has produced rather than the percentage of stakes-winners from all the foals a given cross has produced. Unbridled and his sons have achieved some spectacular success, as acknowledged by eNicks, when crossed of Storm Cat line mares so we still like this cross in spite of it's True Nicks lower grade.

So HAVE FUN, with our True Nicks, but never use nicking as your only decision criteria. However, we're hopeful that once you try all our stallions you'll find a nick you like!

To start using True Nicks simply go to the bottom of our stallion pages and click on the TrueNicks logo. From there you can also download a new brochure for each stallion just above the TrueNicks logo.