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[BLANK_AUDIO]
Alright welcome back and in this lecture we're going to talk about
breeding systems, and again that's a much younger image of me
when, I was actually doing some embryo collections and, and in
parts of Texas when I was at Texas A and M.
And the summers were brutally hot so, you know, that
wasn't mid winter it was, it was really hot every day.
So here's some of the the typical breeding
systems used in the the equine industries specifically horses.
And the last two are not quite as common
but I thought it'd be worthwhile to talk about them.
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Now the first system is, let nature take it's course put
the boys and girls together, or boy and girls not boys.
because then they'll fight each other, and hurt each
other, so put the boy, the stallion or the jack
with the mare or the jennies, and let nature take
its course, and generally, it's, it's, it's a good system.
I mean, you, you, you put them out there and they are going to do their thing.
The only negative of that is, especially if you put a
stallion or a jack that doesn't
know, courtship behaviors, proper courtship behaviors.
They can get hurt.
I mean those, those mares or those jennies will beat
them up if they don't know how to behave themselves.
And yeah, they, they, there's a learning curve.
They'll learn it eventually, but you don't want to,
obviously get your stallion or, or jack injured.
But the benefits of this, it's easy.
You know, go out there and throw them out there and let nature do its thing.
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So, you know, even if you observe their breeding, you
know unless you're ultra-sounding those mares, and know when they ovulate.
You're not going to really know their foaling dates.
And you're not going to really sure unless you bring them
in for preg checks periodically, to see if they're pregnant.
So, you know, there are some drawbacks to it, but it's a very easy
system, and people still use this quite a bit, you know, a little bit.
Now, some more managed breedings is what you call Hand Mating or natural service.
Where you actually leave the stallion and actually let him mount the mare.
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>> So, the benefits of this is a
very controlled situation, and you absolutely are, you know,
99% sure that the mare has been bred, you know, as long as he, he did his thing.
But there are some drawbacks is, again, very labor intensive, pretty scary
if you've never seen this before, there's a lot of moving parts.
And you know these animals are big, I mean upwards of 1,400
pounds of some horses and you know, even our draft horse is 1,800.
So you gotta be kind of careful and it can be dangerous for the animals and you.
So you gotta know what you're doing.
And the other limitation is, you know, you're, you're lim,
limiting that stallion to that one mare, for that one breeding.
So, kind of a little bit of a disadvantage to that system.
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Now, be very careful, and I put this in here, make sure you know your,
your breed registry's rules and regulations, if you
plan on registering that foal, with that registry.
So, for the jockey club, you know, we're going to
talk about some advanced techniques here in a minute.
You can't use those.
You, you have to use natural service.
So, be very aware of that because if you did
AI or some of these other advanced techniques you, you know,
and then try to register em in the jockey club,
they'd say sorry, you know, that, that's not a recognized thoroughbred.
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Okay.
So the next system, and this is common in, you know, a lot of
breed registry as I have a bullet here in a minute, is artificial insemination.
And this is where you actually collect the stallion, with what we
call an AV or an artificial vagina, and you actually inseminate the mare.
So here's somebody, you know, collecting the stallion.
This is what we call a phantom.
>> And this is the AV here, and this is actually that
same research project done in Texas where we're artificially inseminating the mare.
We're actually placing the semen which is in this tube
right there, and we're actually injecting that directly into her uterus.
So we're doing that, and your normal AI dose is 500 million modal sperm cells.
So, so the benefits are this, it's a little bit safer.
You know, even though you do have to collect
the stallion once they're trained, they're, they're, they're pretty well.
So you know, you don't have two moving horses, just one.
And the mare's in the stocks to breed her.
You can breed, really, the major advantage of this is you can breed, more mares per
ejaculate, and on average with stallion normal fertility
you're looking at about 10 mares per day.
'Cause remember they, they're producing billions of sperm cells.
I say in my experiences, and this one still amazes me
I've yet to run into a stallion as fertile as this guy.
Back when I was getting my Masters Project we collected from one day,
and we could have bred 52 mares on the farm that one day.
He was fertile myrtle, I mean that guy, he looked at mares and they were pregnant.
I mean, he was that fertile.
So, you know, it depends on your stallion's
fertility but typically there are around ten, and
some stallions, you know, with poor fertility, you
only bring them one or two mares a day.
But again, you're breeding more horses off that one stallion.
Other benefits are, you know, this thing cooled, shipped semen, so
I can collect one of our stallions here on campus at UF.
I can, we can, we can cool it, and
we can ship it to California on an airplane tonight.
They can get it tomorrow and breed a horse.
So that's pretty common, you know, around
the world now, where people are shipping semen.
Now, freezing semen is something you would do if you want to build up a sperm bank.
So we actually, here at UF, we have a stallion that passed away, and
we actually have, some of his semen that we're still breeding mares from today.
Even though he died quite a few years ago.
But the other benefit with frozen semen is, I can collect our
stallion's here today at UF, freeze it, and then okay, Argentina needs
some, you know, their next breeding season, late in the year, we
can ship some down there, and they can breed horses off UF.
That's you know, we, we could still maybe do
some cooled, shipped semen in some regions of the world.
But you know, typically frozen semen you can ship worldwide.
And, and then the other thing is limiting STDs or sexually transmitted diseases.
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But, again drawbacks, it is labor intensive,
and you do need some technical expertise.
So you need to know how to AI mares,
which isn't as difficult as, as some people would assume.
But you know, if you take a breather short course in your country,
or where you're at, you know you can learn how to AI a horse.
It's not as difficult, but it's collecting stallions takes some, some
handling expertise and you do have to be careful with the boys.
Handling them.
And again, this is allowed by many breed
registries, but some still do not allow this.
Now IBF, just, just talking about some of the advanced ones.
Yeah, not, this isn't as common, you're not seeing it as
much, but it, I, I do want to talk about it.
And, you know, the common test tube type conditions that
we see with humans or with cattle or some other species.
Where you can actually place a unfertilized egg
from, from mom and some sperm cells from dad,
put them in a test tube, and let nature
take its course, let the, the egg be fertilized.
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Culture it out until you get an embryo and
then stick the embryo in a recip, recipient uterus.
That typically, that whole process the,
the fertilization part doesn't happen in horses.
And really it's, it's the sperm cell's fault.
So, you know, it's not the girl's fault, it's the boy's fault.
They don't, they don't in a test tube actually cooperate.
So there's this thing called ICSI and this is called
intracytoplasmic sperm injection, where we actually physically take the sperm cell.
And inject it in the oocyte, and really force fertilization.
So that's the only in the equids today, is
the only IVF procedures that, that we can do.
Now some of the advantage of this again,
if you have a stallion with really poor fertility
or for whatever reason lost his fertility, you
can still breed him with a procedure like this.
Where you actually manually insert the sperm cell.
You also see this with older mares, mares that are having trouble getting pregnant,
you can go in and get some oocytes from them and, and breed them.
There's actually a, a study out of Colorado State,
where they actually had a mare that was euthanized.
They sent the ovaries from the East Coast to Colorado here in the United States.
Got some oocytes and actually got I know at least of, of one foal
from that mare after she had passed, you know, by doing some of these procedures.
So, so there are, it, it is used, it is an advanced technique.
But I will throw up some data from, from one of my research projects.
And again, this was out of Dr Katherine Hendrick's
lab at Texas A and M and, And Dr. Young
Ho Choi who, was just a, a godsend for me
during my Ph.D work because he did all the ICSI.
I just want to show you how inefficient this is.
It, it really isn't very efficient so in
this project we started, just in our control group.
105 ocytes, and afterwards, after we culture them and did ICSI, so here's ICSI.
On this project, we have over a thousand ocytes between our treatment groups.
We got 16 blast assists, that means 16 out of over 100 are the ones that
actually became early embryo that we can turn
around and, and stick it in recipient mare.
And if you're being conservative then maybe eight babies.
So, you're looking at about a 10, less than 10% fertility rate.
So, not, not the greatest, most efficient method of, of
breeding, but it is out there, and people are doing it,
especially with these very, very valuable mares, trying to get
one more foal or, or some of the very valuable stallions.
Now, fun topic I always like talking about is cloning,
because it's, it's such an amazing, process and I was fortunate
to be at Texas A&M when they were doing a
lot of the first, you know, the cats and the deer.
Dewey the Deer, got to play with him quite a bit.
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The first equid was actually a mule at at
the University of Idaho and it was Idaho Gem.
So he was born in 2003, and then a year later, the
first cloned horse came out of Dr. Galli's lab there in Italy, Prometea.
So that was actually the first cloned horse.
And this is actually, the clone herself.
Thats the clone and mama who was the donor.
So, you know, cloning is here in the
equids, you can do, it is available commercially.
But, again, a very, very inefficient process, you'll see here in a second.
Alright, so cloning is also called soma, somatic-cell nuclear transfer, and then
just really briefly, you can look at this on, on your own.
But, you know, Dolly the, the donor, you take the donor nucleus from a normal cell.
The oocyte's the key, the oocytes's what has
all the you know, the developmental triggers in there.
So you take out the, the DNA from a donor, so the donor
oocyte, you take out the genetics of that, and you throw it away.
You take this, say Dolly, the original Dolly,
stuck her DNA in there, you fused it.
You grew an embryo.
You took the embryo and, and, and put it in a recipient mom.
So it's a little bit more complex than that but
that's the, the ten seconds or less version of cloning.
But again amazing process that, that we're able to do that.
And again though it's, it's really inefficient and you know,
most breed registries don't you, don't allow you to register clones.
They're getting better.
I know some of the researchers personally, and they are getting better at this.
And especially for very, very valuable animals that
die unexpectedly, you know, we think that reproductive cloning,
where you actually reproduce them, and then they
go on to breed to pass on their genetics.
You know, for animals that are disease resistant that
we lose, or some things that we want to study.
Those are really, you know, important things.
It brings up a lot of ethics, which we, we don't cover in this class.
But it is important to know, you know, at the end,
here they started with 164, and they're just checking different mediums.
But you can see, you know, less than ten per, I mean, really
what, less than 5% there, and then less than 10% from the original.
Actually became blastocysts after nuclear transfer, after cloning.
And then you are looking at, one out of four if you are lucky.
But really one out of ten become actual foals on the ground,
so you know that's some of the data that's been reported out there.
But it's there, and you know if you've got some money
and you want to clone your animal you can do that.