Equine Embryo Transfer Lab
One plus one plus one equals one. The stallion, dam, and surrogate dam probably never met, but all three contributed to produce a foal. Today’s assisted breeding technologies can overcome the constraints of distance, competitive involvement, reproductive health, and the calendar.
As a horse breeder, you can employ embryo transfer to produce better foals (in most breeds except Thoroughbreds). In your goal of improving your stock, you can influence the quality of the new generation. Your valuable mare is able to reproduce many more foals than possible through traditional breeding regimens.
Do you have a mare with a reproductive disorder that prevents her from carrying a pregnancy to term? What about a very old mare that doesn’t need to go through the rigors of carrying and delivering a foal? Maybe you have a superstar mare whose babies are in high demand, and you would like her to produce multiple foals in one year. Or, perhaps you want to breed your talented sport horse or racing mare without taking her out of competition.
For these reasons and others you might want your veterinarian to perform an embryo transfer, which allows another mare to carry and deliver your mare’s foal. Relocating an equine embryo from one mare to another, however, is an involved procedure that only an experienced equine reproductive specialist should perform. Timing a successful embryo flush can be tricky, as veterinarians can only flush fertilized eggs (embryos) from the uterus at specific times. Most commonly the practitioner transfers the embryo immediately into a recipient mare, as freezing these embryos for later use has not been as historically successful in horses as in other species.
