HBG are a little more aggressive to swimmers than BG, but if girls swimming is not important HBG can work. Make sure you read the posts about HBG in the Archives before pulling the trigger for HBG. Also HBG will not grow very big bass unless you buy pellet trained LMB and feed them like crazy. A predator with HBG that will grow bigger than the LMB is the HSB if you feed them regularly with pellets; also read research them. Producing your goals of ""good horse sized BG/HBG, but I love catching monster bass too"" are two goals that are not easy to do because growing big BG or HBG requires them to be in low numbers while growing big bass requires lots of smaller BG or very high numbers of the proper sized forage fish. It is hard to get this done in a small pond and even in a larger pond. Pellet feeding helps a lot to get around this management dilemma.
My being very knowledgeable about bluntnose minnow and spotfin shiners, neither of them will do well with LMB due to the high predation tendency of LMB and the smaller top end sizes of BNM and SFS. These forage species work best in waters with fewer predators, those with smaller mouths, and abundant diverse submerged vegetation & habitat. GSH would work better with LMB in you have adequate cover which takes quite a bit for GSH to thrive with LMB as aggressive predators.
