Blog Archives

Healthy Stallion Management - By Jos Mottershead

3/27/2017

It's great to see you back at the Avalon Equine Blog! I hope you're enjoying our commentaries & that they are proving useful! As the resident stallion manager & handler, I'm going to focus on "the boys" in my first few Blog posts, & in this one, healthy stallion management. I cannot emphasise too much that stallions are a horse first & a stallion second. And that means they respond to stimuli - or a lack thereof - in an equine manner, with a dose of testosterone mixed in. This awareness - indeed understanding - is very important as a basis for managing stallions. While one pays attention to the fact that they are stallions, & so doesn't do things which are going to lead to issues, they need to be managed as horses, not some Pariah of Society. In particular, they need social interaction with other horses. This too I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of which was demonstrated admirably by some research out of U-Pa (New Bolton) which showed that in a natural herd setting, stallions had around 200 interactions with other horses an hour.
To understand domestic healthy stallion management possibilities better, we should review what happens in nature. There are 3 different ways in which an entire male horse is "managed".
The Harem stallion is one which has a group of mares. In time, those mares will produce colts, & those colts will reach sexual maturity. There may be a few who stay within the harem herd, even assisting the dominant stallion with managing the herd (but not breeding mares), but most will leave & seek a situation in the second "management" arrangement.

Avalon Equine's "Healthy Stallion Management consists of stallions living in large runs, outdoors 24/7 with run in sheds adjacent to other stallions - simulating a bachelor herd environment.

The bachelor herd comprises of young intact males. We even see this in the human herd - they're the lads hanging out on the street corner, racing cars or motorcycles & whistling at the girls! The bachelor herd consists of solely males - there is no mare interaction within the herd. Once a female is introduced, competition starts (with both horses and humans!). A bachelor stallion may go off & seek a mare to breed & then either form his own harem herd, or return to the bachelor herd. There will be a dominant male within the bachelor herd, but if he leaves & returns after another colt has ascended to dominancy, there is no serious competition for the "herd boss" position, & the original leader resumes his lead position. This arrangement therefore is a very peaceful one when used in a domestic setting. Interestingly, homosexual behaviours are seen in equine bachelor herds, including sexual acts with rectal intromission.
What is rarely seen in the wild is the lone stallion. He is usually the old horse which has been driven off from his harem herd by a younger interloper stallion, & is waiting for the passing pride of lions to jump on him & eat him for breakfast. Understandably, this is not a happy situation for a stallion, & therefore should not be replicated in a domestic setting!
The ultimate "harem stallion" domestically is of course the stallion which runs with mares. We do not really recommend that, as there are obvious inherent risks to both stallion & mares. When lecturing, I invariably encounter someone who says "well, our stallion's never had a problem...", but the fact remains that he only needs a single problem if it's bad enough, & it's all over. What one can do however is have the stallion in a separate pen or stall adjacent to & in the sight of mares. These mares will then become "his" herd.

Goldmaker - a Cremello TB stallion, and Colorado Skrødstrup, a Knabstrupper stallion- at Avalon Equine in a domestic "bachelor herd" environment. Stallions live in adjacent runs with a "buffer" zone between them.

Similarly, bachelor herd arrangement could be achieved by turning all the stallions out together. Again, we don't recommend this!! There are in fact some well-known facilities in Europe who do exactly this at the end of the breeding season & it works well for them, but my nerves are not that good. So as with the harem stallion, one can also have the stallions penned or stalled next to & visible to each other. While it may be necessary to move individual stallions around in the arrangement, as they can have likes or dislikes for a specific neighbour, this arrangement will typically work well for multiple stallions, although being individuals, there will be exceptions. The important key here is that there is no mare interaction - do not drop a mare into the middle of the bachelor herd arrangement, or all hell will break loose!

A dirty stallion is a happy stallion! This is Toronto - one of the Hanoverian warmblood stallions standing at Avalon Equine. Allowing stallions to live as close to natural as possible minimizes stress and helps to maintain a healthy, happy stallion!

The bachelor herd arrangement is how we maintain health stallion management with most stallions at Avalon Equine & Equine-Reproduction.com, LLC. We can have anywhere up to 20 stallions on the property at the same time, so the bachelor herd works very well in keeping the peace. Competition between the horses is minimal & even when introducing new animals, there is only about 5 minutes or so of "chest thumping" challenging, & then all go back to peacefully eating.

4 Comments

First Impressions

3/21/2017

0 Comments

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Avalon Equine! For those of you who have never made my acquaintance, my name is Josh Milledge and I work full-time for Jos and Kathy. Since this is my first BLOG posting for this site, I'll tell you a little about myself before endeavoring further.

First, I married into horses. I didn't spend my formative years learning the intricacies of horsemanship. I spent them as a Navy brat whose family of four consistently moved every three years until my father finished his eighteen year enlistment and we resettled near Oklahoma's panhandle, also the place of my birth. Consequently, the closest we ever came to owning a 1200 pound animal was an egregiously overweight feline named Hobbes fellowed with an eccentric hamster named Calvin (both titled after a beloved boyhood comic series to which I related most). The only exposure I had with the equestrian field before I met my future betrothed was scant, at best. Nevertheless, since meeting my wife three years ago and opening Pandora's equine box, I have learned much from her as well as from my current employers.

The first impression I had of Avalon Equine when I started last year essentially mimicked the first experience I had in the military nearly sixteen years ago. Of course, it didn't follow that of the basic training experience that every military member has when they first enlist because I went to boot camp nine months after joining my unit, like many Army National Guard personnel do. Contrastingly, my first experience I had with the military was that of a three day Live Fire Exercise (LFX) in Ft. Chaffee, AR attempting to perform a variety of tasks that were otherwise antithetic to normal civilian life in an atmosphere where everyone already knew their job. Likewise, my first workday occurred after the height of breeding season yet still in the thick of it when dozens of broodmares were being managed and several stallion collections were being conducted aside from the normal daily operations of any horse ranch.

To put this into perspective, my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) involves emplacing and firing 105mm howitzers into an unseen area within any given theater of ground operations. It essentially amounts to aiming and shooting an oversized rifle except the rounds are only expended with an outside observer's guidance considering the intended target's distance, unless the howitzer crew can see their target such as in the rare direct-fire situation. So, as you may imagine, firing a howitzer is more complicated and requires the coordinated effort of far more people than simply aiming and firing a rifle. I quickly learned during my first LFX in 2001, this same type of realization encompasses my first impression of Avalon Equine. Ultimately, throughout my first days of work, I was impressed with the coordination and knowledge each member displayed, including the seasonal interns that were working there at the time. Everyone knew their specified job during each task, such as stallion collection, mare management, and general horsemanship activities.

Stallion collections are always an interesting occurrence here, as I'm sure they are on every breeding ranch. My first few that I performed during initial training were actually conducted on my wife's Friesian which, as I discovered later, proved to be some of the easiest. By comparison, he was a docile lamb in relation to some of the others we've collected since. So, needless to say, my first impression of stallion collection was significantly skewed.

Certain aspects of mare management were also revealing and somewhat confusing, at first. Watching Kathy expound on the intricacies of the mare reproductive system via ultrasound was somewhat daunting. I still occasionally struggle with what I'm seeing on the monitor as I watch her ultrasound mares, but I have a far better understanding than when I first began observing. I'm always relieved to be on the eating side of the horse while she conducts ultrasounds considering all of the feces that has to removed by hand before the procedure can be conducted.

I was also intrigued by a few aspects of my new employers' unorthodox management style. Like Kathy always declares: "We try to make it fun around here". Case in point, she has a tendency to purchase inflatable outfits that depict the wearer as riding some kind of animal like a horse or an ostrich. Tutus are also another favorite. Of course, I haven't partaken in any of these shenanigans-not in fear of the opinions of any innocent bystanders who might see such a scene-but simply because I worry for the safety of every horse on the property and such a sight might just put them at too great a risk. Ultimately, tutus and inflatable costumes are just unsafe for both horse and human, alike. Safety first.

Complementing the subject of fun at work, construction and repair projects are always a joy and somewhat comical activity when all of us are participating in them here at Avalon, as I quickly discovered when I began my employment. I've been in the construction industry since high school (albeit on the Heating and Air Conditioning side) and I've enjoyed the work dynamic of several different construction crews, but this one is definitely the most fun and entertaining. Ultimately, any task on which we embark always reaches completion yet not without the crew's fair share of logistical disagreements, jibes, and humorous expletives-chiefly between the projects two chiefs. Described musically, the work environment concerning projects and remodels is rock and roll sprinkled with jazz contrasting the timeliness of classical. All kidding aside, I truly do enjoy it.

In final, my first impressions of Avalon Equine were promising, encouraging, and enjoyable (a statement which was in no way coerced by my Editor-in-Chief).

Happy Foaling, Everyone!

0 Comments

Drawing Blood on the Newborn Foal

3/14/2017

3 Comments

First of all, Welcome to Avalon Equine! We are thrilled that you have come to visit us and check out all we have available. As many of you know, we also own Equine-Reproduction.com, LLC and are big on educating breeders, horse people and health professionals in the equine industry! We have been asked repeatedly, to start a blog here on the website but for one reason or another, haven't been able to sit down and get to it. We've finally started one, but have decided we’re going to do things a bit differently! While we will definitely be blogging, there will be three of us doing the blogging here. Me - Kathy St.Martin; my husband and partner in the business, Jos Mottershead; and our wonderful farm manager and right hand man, Josh Milledge. We thought it might be fun and interesting to see what we do here from different perspectives. Hopefully, you will find these informational, helpful, insightful, entertaining, funny, and as is sometimes the case when dealing with animals, sad.

So today’s blog will start with pulling blood for IgG tests on foals!

One of the things that we always do with our foals at 9 to 12 hours after birth, is an IgG test. Foals are born with a functioning immune system, but it has not developed any antibodies. The main immunoglobulin (antibody) produced in the colostrum is gamma globulin (IgG) and the foal must receive that within the first 24 hours of life. But if the foal is slow to nurse, the mare has poor quality colostrum or has streamed milk for days prior to foaling, or if the foal is unable to absorb those antibodies, you may have a foal that has failed passive transfer. In order to be proactive, rather than reactive, one can easily pull an IgG test. If you know that a foal is low or has failed passive transfer at 9 to 12 hours post foaling, you still have approximately a 12 hour window to address the problem orally with another mare’s colostrum that is known to be good quality, or with a commercial product such as Seramune. We will then test again at 24 hours to insure that we have sufficient immune coverage. If at 24 hours, the reading is still low or passive transfer has failed, one can then address the problem with a transfusion.

There are several stall side tests available that cost as low as about $10. They can be purchased singly or in kits of 10 – obviously the more you buy, the lower the cost. Two of the most common are the Idexx Snap test and the Immuno-Chek G. The tests come with complete instructions, so I’m not going to go into detail on the entire process. But, both do require being able to pull blood a small amount of blood from the foal and is where many become a bit uncomfortable – attaining that sample of blood. Our goal here is to show you just how easy it really is to do! Indeed, I often end up doing it by myself – so the photos that accompany this Blog will show me doing exactly that!

The first thing is to either catch the foal when it is lying down as in the photo below, or you will have to lay the foal down. You "can" pull blood with the foal standing, but we have just found it much easier to do with the foal lying down and definitely easier to do if you are having to do this procedure by yourself!

A resting newborn foal, by Cremello Thoroughbred Stallion Goldmaker

Not all foals will be so cooperative and be lying down when you are ready to pull blood. With those that are standing, the easiest way we have found, is to wrap our arms around the foal as seen in the first picture below. Slide your hands down the legs opposite to your body - in this case, the foals left front and back legs - and gently lift the foal up while "rotating" it sideways, and gently laying it down, as in the second picture below.

Wrap your arms around the foals chest and rear, grabbing a hind leg.

Gently lay the foal down.

Next, straddle the foal and apply pressure to keep it lying down. They might initially struggle, but usually stop fairly quickly. You "will" have to hold them down somewhat with your body, but as you can see in these photos, you don't need to put much, if any, weight on them. Straighten the neck out as shown in the first photo below, and raise the jugular vein as you would for any other blood draw. Please note that I am using a 1cc Insulin syringe with a 28 gauge 1/2 inch needle. The needle is very, very fine and indeed, we use them for as many applications when giving injections as possible, in order to inflict as little discomfort as is possible.

Straddle the foal, be sure not to put too much weight on them. Straighten their neck to gain access to the jugular.

Use a small needle for comfort when drawing blood for an IgG test

We use a 1cc Insulin syringe with a 28 gauge 1/2 inch needle to make the process as pain free as possible.

You need very little blood for this test - typically we pull around 2/10ths cc. We then decant that blood into the needle cap.

Follow the IgG kit instructions to test the blood.

Next, using the 10 µL (ten microliter) pipettor pull up the blood and decant it into the dilution solution as per the kit instructions. Mix well and follow the rest of the test's instructions according to the one you will use. In this particular test, we were using the Immuno-Chek G.

Foal IgG test, determining whether more colostrum is needed.

And of course, when you are done taking the blood, make sure you give the foal lots of scratches!

3 Comments

Healthy Stallion Management - By Jos Mottershead

First Impressions

Drawing Blood on the Newborn Foal

And of course, when you are done taking the blood, make sure you give the foal lots of scratches!

Authors

Archives

Categories