This year’s breeding season is certainly under way.  The early warm spring weather brought many mares into season though the recent bout of torrential rain seems to have turned  some mares off! 

advance planning is essential to a stressfree breeding programme. 

If considering breeding from your mare please consider the following points:

• Either choose your stallion, as this will determine the method of conception, or decide on your preferred method of conception and this will determine your stallion choice!

So you have:

• Natural covering (Mare goes to Stallion). 
• Artificial Insemination (Mare stays at home and Semen travels to you)
• Artificial insemination can involve Chilled semen or Frozen semen.

 

 

 

Have you noticed the new logo or the sign writing on the van?

A really good investment from Re-Design of Andover.

 

 

 

Recent advances in tendon repair has lead to the use of filtered blood products such as platelets and associated Growth Factors to be used to great success.  Blood is drawn from the injured horse, the platelets separated ‘stable side’ and then injected into the damaged tendon, ligament or even joint capsule.  The presence of the platlets and the growth factors draws in ‘repair cells’ to lead to an enhanced healing.

Platelet Enhancement Therapy is considered a relevation in the repair of tendons

Feacal egg counts are a great way of assessing your horse’s health with regard to internal parasites.  The four most common internal parasites are:

•  Encysted redworm, Roundworms, Tapeworms and Bots.

However only Roundworms reliably excrete eggs in proportion to their infestation.

Encysted redworm are a casing point…. their life cycle involves a ‘hibernation’ phase where the larvae burrow into and live in the actual gut wall for a variable period of time and then are triggered into hatching out through the gut wall again and becoming egg laying adult worms.

You can, and I have recently had, a scenario where the feacal egg count is ZERO yet the next day the horse has diarrhoea with characteristic small redworm larvae wiggling around in the poo!

Tapeworms have a prolonged life cycle and excrete egg laden sacs at intermittent periods.  These can be seen with the naked eye lying on the surface of feaces appearing as large “rice” segments.

Bots lay eggs on the lower limbs of horses which are ingested and the larvae then end up attached to the lining of the stomach. These bot larvae are occasionally seen in the feaces looking like a bumble bee without wings.

Another misnomer with the Negative feacal egg count could be PINWORM infestation, where the adult worm lays eggs on the perineum, around the anus.  Again a zero count is possible with adult pinworm seen lying on the feaces!