Page 140 - Speedhorse February 2018

“If a veterinarian checks the mare, anywhere, and she has a lot of small follicles, they can bring her here
and we can do her that same day.”
finally gave up and didn’t try to do her because we worried that we couldn’t get her sedated enough. She’s the only mare, out of more than 300 aspirations, that we actually didn’t do just because I was worried that she was too risky,” he says.
It’s a fine line because the mare must be sedated enough to let a person poke needles in the ovaries while standing, yet not fall down from the sedation. “They are heavily sedated, so they don’t feel anything,” he explains. The needle may penetrate the ovary 1 to four times per aspiration and several follicles can be reached with one penetration.
Another question people ask is how soon can their mare go back into athletic com- petition following this procedure. “We get mares from the track, barrel racers, three-day eventers and dressage horses, etc. We have done almost every breed including Arabians and warmbloods. When we were first doing this, and were very concerned about possible complications from this procedure, we would keep all the mares overnight and watch them and check them again in the morning before we’d let them go home,” he says.
This past year was so busy that they didn’t have time to do that. The mares would arrive in the morning, be aspirated and kept until they woke up. “We let the owners pick them up at four in the afternoon and we didn’t have any issues. The client often asks how soon they can go back to running barrels, because some- times they are just passing through here on their way to the Cow Palace at San Francisco or some other big event, wanting us to aspirate the mare as they drive by,” says Beck.
“I tell them they don’t need to have their mare here very long. If a veterinarian checks the mare, anywhere, and she has a lot of small follicles, they can bring her here and we can
do her that same day. Just don’t feed her in
the morning and we’ll do her. They can take the mare home late that same afternoon. If they want to go run the barrels, however, we recommend they wait three days. This figure is just off the top of our head, to be safe. If there is any possibility of hemorrhage (which we are very confident there won’t be) we know there won’t be a problem after three days,” he says.
One client brought in a three-day eventer,
a warmblood mare, last year from San Juan Capistrano, California. “This mare was in Olympic training, getting ready for a big show, and the owner decided to breed her to a big Olympic stallion who was ICSI only because of fertility problems. We told them about the routine and what to expect. They had already talked to a friend of theirs who we’d had good success with ICSI, so they really wanted to
do this procedure. They brought their mare and we aspirated some eggs and they wanted to know when they could put her back into training.”
Three-day eventing is strenuous competi- tion, with jumping, endurance, etc. The trainer came to pick up the mare and Beck told the trainer that after three days she would probably be fine to compete. “I asked him to give me a call in a week and let me know how the mare did after the ICSI, because some people have said that their mare didn’t want to run barrels because their back hurt or wouldn’t do this or that. The trainer called me back in a week and
I asked how the mare did,” says Beck.
“He told me that the third day after the
aspiration, they did dressage exercises and loped around, then started going over jumps and by the end of the week, the mare was doing everything. I asked him what he thought of the mare’s performance and he said she
was the best she’s ever been. That was good to know. I have never had a complaint that a mare didn’t do well after the procedure and we’ve done a lot of athletic horses that are still actively competing in their various careers,” he says.
“If anyone had a problem, they have never told us about it and I suspect we’d be the first ones to know. We’ve been doing this now for 11 years and I have become more and more confident about the safety factor in terms of future fertility and the safety of the procedure in terms of complications,” Beck says.
AGE OF THE MARE
In general, young mares are better can- didates for this procedure. “When mares get over 20, fertility goes down. In mares over 25 years old, it becomes much more difficult. The loss rate goes up as the age goes up. Pregnancy loss rate goes to 30% or higher in mares over 25. We try to discourage people from doing old mares because it’s a lot of work, with less success. People get very excited when we get an embryo from an old mare, the recipient gets pregnant and then they lose it. This is very discouraging.”
There are always exceptions, however, to the age factor. “We’ve had some young mares that did not work and a few old mares that did
BABY PICTURES
With modern cell phones, Beck can put a phone on the eyepiece of his microscope and take pictures and send them to the client’s phone. “We do the pregnancy-checks every 5 days and I can take a photo of the ultrasound screen and send it to the client while the staff is bringing the next mare up. Clients get very excited about being able to keep track of the entire procedure from the first cell division. We also show them the video of the egg being injected and then pictures of the egg when it starts to cleave. We check again on day four and by then, there are usually eight or 16 cells because they’ve divided a couple of times. On the ninth day after injection, it’s a beautiful embryo, ready to transfer.” Some people like to have a photographic record of the process as the egg becomes an embryo and then becomes a baby.
One client put all those pictures on a video and set it to music, as the story of her horse from the beginning. “When they show this to other people, they get an idea about how it really works. Once people have actually had a mare here and gone through it, they understand it, but the photos do help show what’s involved.”
138 SPEEDHORSE, February 2018
EQUINE HEALTH