Page 98 - June 2016

INDUCING LACTATION IN MARES TO CREATE AN INSTANT NURSE MARE
“The great thing about the mare we used was that she was a naturally maternal individual and it was easy to adopt the foal onto her.”
by Heather Smith Thomas
Sometimes a crisis occurs at foaling, making it necessary to find an alternative way to raise the foal. A mare may die during or soon after foal- ing, or refuse to mother the foal, leaving an orphan to feed. Occasionally a nurse mare can be located, such as a lactating mare that foaled about the same time and lost her own foal, but you must convince her to raise the orphan foal as her own. Other options include raising the foal on a goat or with a replacement formula (bottle or bucket-fed). Another option is to induce lactation in a dry, barren mare by use of drugs.
Bill Tracy, manager of the Eureka Thoroughbred Farm near Fredericksburg, Texas, tells about his experience inducing lactation in a dry mare when he was managing Oak Tree Farm in south Texas. This experiment turned out to be very successful, and other breeders have also tried this technique with good success.
“We had a mare that foundered a few years earlier and her condition deteriorated in early 2003. The heavier she got in late pregnancy, the worse she got. We were all crossing our fingers, hoping she would improve after she foaled. Getting rid of the extra weight of the foal, placenta and fluids would take 250 pounds off her, and she might do better. But after she foaled, she did not improve and she was in a lot of pain. She spent most of the day lying down.”
Tracy knew that the merciful thing to do would be to euthanize the mare, but the foal needed a mother. He tried to track down a nurse mare.
I’d read about. It didn’t give any details about how to do it. The paper just said it worked and describe their trial with this procedure.”
Tracy’s veterinarian tracked down the company that manufactures one of the drugs (domperidone) used in the trial. “My vet then called Dr. Dee Cross at Clemson University (in South Carolina), who had been involved in that study and he described how to do it. On our farm, we had a barren mare that would make a good candidate and we put her on a protocol of the recommended drugs.”
This mare was a buddy of the foundered mare. “They were the same generation and had grown up together. The barren mare was one we elected not
to breed anymore. She was a gray mare with a lot
of melanomas. We decided not to put her through any more stress having foals, and just pensioned her. She was a sweet mare and very easy to work with,” recalls Tracy.
The hardest part in the whole process, according to the people who did the trial, is convincing the bar- ren mare to accept the foal after inducing her to cre- ate milk. “Our foal was two weeks old, which would theoretically make it even harder. He was used to nursing his dam while she was lying on the ground,”
Bill Tracy, manager of
Eureka Thoroughbred Farm near Fredericksburg, Texas, has had good success inducing lactation in a dry mare.
“Where we lived in south Texas, available nurse mares (most of them in Kentucky) were a long way away. I had read an article about inducing lactation in barren mares and did some homework on that, but no one I asked about this knew anything about it. I called some veterinar- ian friends in Kentucky, and they told me it didn’t work. But my veterinar- ian and another vet got
to talking about it, and gave me an article from a veterinary meeting that outlined the procedure
96 SPEEDHORSE, June 2016
EQUINE HEALTH