Did your breeding create a good nick? I have always had good luck with repeating the breedings that resulted in superior breedings. That’s called a “good nick” but the larger idea is to discover a “good nick” between blood lines or strains of pure bred animals. Anne Peters’ article provides some interesting insights about how “good nicks” occur.
Just what the heck is a "nick" anyway? Being curious as to where this term came from, the author consulted Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary and discovered that it actually had a genetic definition: "to complement one another genetically and produce superior offspring.” Yup. That about sums it up. A nick is a cross of two bloodlines that seems to produce superior results.
Nicks have been around as long as there have been Thoroughbreds, and probably as long as there have been animal breeders. Some of the earliest include the Godolphin Arabian crossed on daughters of The Bald Galloway, a cross that produced this foundation sire's most important offspring Lath, Cade, and Regulus (see Andrea Hoogendoorn's interesting article on Siblings.) Lath and Cade were out of the same mare, Roxana, while Regulus was out of a second daughter of Bald Galloway named Grey Robinson.
Click here to read the article.