This is certainly not Stella I'm talking about, and Ernie, well, Ernie lacks the necessary equipment to, uh, make little swimmers.
I spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday at the UVM Morgan Horse Farm at their annual Equine Reproduction Clinic. I got to sign up through the college (the thing costs $250 for the 2 days!) so I didn't have to pay a cent. I kind of figured I may as well get my money's worth from this place while I'm here; they get enough of mine each semester.
Pretty much one of the coolest things ever. I have been thinking more about equine reproduction because it IS a really fast-growing field, has job opportunities, and is something that will never get old because you always have advances being made. The farm uses only AI techniques, no live cover (they say to spare both the stallions and the mares from unnecessary trauma), so the process is quite a bit more complicated. You have to go beyond just tracking fertility cycles and dealing with appropriately administering hormones to broodmares (if you have to short-cycle, bring into heat, etc) to set up the breeding process. Collecting semen is probably one of the more exhausting parts. A lot of the clinic participants were hesitant to collect a stallion because, well, it's dangerous. You're holding an artificial vagina (AV) which is essentially just a PVC pipe with a handle, lined with insulating material (and filled with warm water) and a disposable bag covered in lube. At the bottom is a bottle under a filter to separate out the gel fraction of the semen. The stallion comes in, hollers a ton, fusses, teases the mare (none of whom were particularly cooperative; I think they got irritated standing there in the teasing rack after a while, and wanted nothing to do with any stallion that was brought in, even the ones that were showing a hot heat earlier), gets excited, drops, gets washed, the AV handler is cued, and the stallion is moved to the phantom.
I happened to get the two youngest, most inexperienced stallions, who not only were the most obnoxious but took several jumps to the phantom before they were able to be collected. For those of you who haven't worked with stallions, almost all of them are obnoxious, to some degree. The UVM stallions are very well trained but are still allowed to act as natural as possible when interacting with the mare before they go to the phantom. They know they do not, under any circumstances, step into the space of the handler, they know the cue to go to the phantom, and they know that they are allowed to sniff, nip, lick and interact with the mare (which sometimes includes striking out and rearing if the mare isn't receptive). They aren't punished for acting like a stallion normally would, which makes them very good breeders. They know their job, and they do it. Morgans are a very exuberant breed, so these guys are all very flashy and dramatic in their breeding presentation, but they are well-behaved.
With that said, I got the two green guys. They've only been collected a dozen times at most, so they took much longer to get ready to jump and took multiple jumps before they finished the job. The first stallion, a 4 year old, didn't get the job done at all. He apparently was the most sensitive of the 6 stallions on the farm, and the tease mare was not at ALL happy to see him. She was a 0 on the heat scale, and was eventually swapped out. After 4 exhaustive attempts with him, he was swapped out with another, slightly older stallion, a 6 year old who had been collected only a few times more. He also took several jumps to the phantom before he finished, one of which almost resulted in me underneath his haunches as he slid off the phantom mare. Like I said, kind of dangerous.
In the end, we got what we needed and were able to analyze it, but not before I got covered in hair, sweat, horsey foam and uh, pre-ejaculate (from an earlier, failed attempt with Stallion #1...)
But wait, there's more! I got to practice performing AI on a maiden mare, who was under heavy sedation (which was probably the only reason she cooperated...that, and I have small hands relatively narrows forearms, a blessing for her.) The "semen" was really just a saline solution, but the rest was very realistic, and very cool.
So while yes, this got me thinking about breeding, I will never breed Stella. She's a wonderful mare, but not long to have babies. Not with those back legs and that hind end, anyway. I know her faults, and I love her regardless, but unless they figure out a way to pick and choose which parts of mommy and daddy the baby gets, she won't be bearing any wee ones.
And Ernie, it's probably just as well he got his balls cut off when he was a wee one himself. I have a feeling he would have been hell on earth if he hadn't...
No comments:
Post a Comment