Injury/Broodmare

Accountess broke her leg :frowning: and was retired to broodmare status, she is 2. Will she be able to breed at 3? I figured 4, but I thought I’d ask since I had a recent inqury about her.

No, she won’t be able to breed until she’s 4.

kinda weird… in real life a farms not going to waste that year when they can get a foal on the ground.

In RL they would first need to heal the break… that could take up to a year or more depending where the break was… then they’d have to make sure she was sound enough to carry that foal to term… most big farms don’t bother unless the mare has done extremely well on the track… and or is out of black type producing parents… Just a reality of the industry…

My mare “broke down” (i.e. got kicked and shattered her elbow joint)…we did surgery in the hope that she’d be pasture/breeding sound, but as Dawn said, it would’ve been months before she was even able to leave the stall, let alone walk around.  (I suppose we could’ve bred her via AI while she was healing, but that seems cruel to put a horse through all that added stress.)

TBs, of course, need to be bred live cover to be registered, so you can’t just go the AI route to avoid needing the mare to be sound enough for breeding.

All you have to do is look at Barbaro.  He was at New Bolton for a long time. All kinds of complications arise.

Look at The Tin Man.  Trainer had him sent in to “clean up” his ankle cause there was a chip in it.  Horse came out of anesthesia bad and broke his knee.  Now they are trying to figure out how to fix his knee so he can just live a “normal” life as a gelding.

RL breeding of Tb’s requires at least 1 live cover per heat cycle the mare has.  The next “covers” during that heat cycle, can be done AI as long as it was done that day.    Say you have 3 mares in at the same time.  AP Indy has done a live mount on all 3, 2 days before. They can bring Indy in and collect him off the dummy and then bring in the 3 mares and inseminate them right afterwards.  You cannot collect on Monday and breed w/ it on Wednesday.  Depending on volume, 1 shot from a stud can do 3-5 mares.  The vets in Kentucky have this down to a science and conception rate is pretty high.  The reason is that the vet can “deposit” the sperm right where it needs to be instead of the normal long swim they have to do. 

I have worked on a TB breeding farm and the breeding science now days has come a long ways since we used to do it back in the late 70’s.