Well, everyone loves a foal but I'm glad you don't have an unexpected one on the way! Good luck with the regumate, it sounds as though the initial signs are postive.
Fat or in Foal??
- Thread starter Sam_and_Cleggy
- Start date
I'm so happy to hear this update! While a foal would've been awesome, its nice that you'll just be able to focus on her. I'm also happy to hear that your vet was able to get to the root of the problem so quickly. ?
I don't know if this helps anyone but my vet offered me a pretty good explanation when I was onsite for the ultrasound of my mare. I had to haul her into the vet because they don't have portable scanners. When I arrived onsite with her the vet and I discussed why I thought she was pregnant and we calculated out how far along she could've been. Now I'm pretty fortunate because I have pretty accurate timelines due to how I came into ownership of this mare. Together the vet and I estimated IF she was pregnant at the very least she was 4.5 months pregnant.
In the end my vet opted to do the blood test but they explained this to me. . . First off my mare has a small heart murmur so they didn't want to sedate her in order to perform a ultrasound especially since she would be far enough along that a blood test would be very accurate. They also explained that as long as a mare is past 90 days the blood test will be accurate whereas it can be difficult to get a good ultrasound image unless she is much farther along (7+ months pregnant). The vet explained it much better but from what I gathered ultrasounds are the easiest and most accurate to obtain after a mare is covered and then when a mare is much farther along. But once the fetus moves lower into the belly then it is more difficult which is a factor as to why my vet opted for the blood tests. Don't get my wrong I was very unhappy to hear this because I hauled her in to get immediate results but I understood and appreciated the in depth explanation I was given.
Now I'm located in the US so I don't know if there is a difference in equipment between continents, also in my area the vet clinics are smaller (only 2-3 drs per clinic) and each clinic focuses on only a couple areas of equine medicine which is a reason horse owners in my area do so much vet hopping. So perhaps if I had hauled her to a reproductive expert they would have had state of the art ultrasound equipment and had no problem sedating her and immediately finding the position to get accurate images.
In the end my mare is NOT pregnant. And my vet and I have discovered the problem, short explanation, its me, I am the problem.
You see I don't know what her breeding is, so I took what I know about horse breeds and what breeds are common to the area where I purchased her and I assumed she was a QH TB cross. Since coming to that conclusion I have been feeding her to get the build of a QH TB cross. In tandem with the pregnancy test I also mailed in a DNA test.
This DNA test means nothing as far as pedigree, I cannot use this to get her registered. I am unsure if I could use these results to enter any horse in breed specific competitions. However other owners have been using these tests to help guide their decisions on what to do with horses of unknown origin.
In this instance after receiving the DNA results the conclusion that my vet, my trainer and I have come to is that I have been overfeeding because I've been under the impression that she should look one way, when in fact if I go by the DNA results she should have a different body type. In conclusion if I had done a DNA test when I first acquired her I would have realized that all she needed was conditioning, not weight gain+conditioning and that I should have had completely different physique expectations for her.
I'm definitely going to document her progress and see how she blossoms. My only complaint is that this DNA test raises more questions than answers. My 2 biggest questions are how did I come into ownership of a horse with that DNA? And what in the world was a horse with this DNA doing in the area I found her!?
I don't know if this helps anyone but my vet offered me a pretty good explanation when I was onsite for the ultrasound of my mare. I had to haul her into the vet because they don't have portable scanners. When I arrived onsite with her the vet and I discussed why I thought she was pregnant and we calculated out how far along she could've been. Now I'm pretty fortunate because I have pretty accurate timelines due to how I came into ownership of this mare. Together the vet and I estimated IF she was pregnant at the very least she was 4.5 months pregnant.
In the end my vet opted to do the blood test but they explained this to me. . . First off my mare has a small heart murmur so they didn't want to sedate her in order to perform a ultrasound especially since she would be far enough along that a blood test would be very accurate. They also explained that as long as a mare is past 90 days the blood test will be accurate whereas it can be difficult to get a good ultrasound image unless she is much farther along (7+ months pregnant). The vet explained it much better but from what I gathered ultrasounds are the easiest and most accurate to obtain after a mare is covered and then when a mare is much farther along. But once the fetus moves lower into the belly then it is more difficult which is a factor as to why my vet opted for the blood tests. Don't get my wrong I was very unhappy to hear this because I hauled her in to get immediate results but I understood and appreciated the in depth explanation I was given.
Now I'm located in the US so I don't know if there is a difference in equipment between continents, also in my area the vet clinics are smaller (only 2-3 drs per clinic) and each clinic focuses on only a couple areas of equine medicine which is a reason horse owners in my area do so much vet hopping. So perhaps if I had hauled her to a reproductive expert they would have had state of the art ultrasound equipment and had no problem sedating her and immediately finding the position to get accurate images.
In the end my mare is NOT pregnant. And my vet and I have discovered the problem, short explanation, its me, I am the problem.
You see I don't know what her breeding is, so I took what I know about horse breeds and what breeds are common to the area where I purchased her and I assumed she was a QH TB cross. Since coming to that conclusion I have been feeding her to get the build of a QH TB cross. In tandem with the pregnancy test I also mailed in a DNA test.
This DNA test means nothing as far as pedigree, I cannot use this to get her registered. I am unsure if I could use these results to enter any horse in breed specific competitions. However other owners have been using these tests to help guide their decisions on what to do with horses of unknown origin.
In this instance after receiving the DNA results the conclusion that my vet, my trainer and I have come to is that I have been overfeeding because I've been under the impression that she should look one way, when in fact if I go by the DNA results she should have a different body type. In conclusion if I had done a DNA test when I first acquired her I would have realized that all she needed was conditioning, not weight gain+conditioning and that I should have had completely different physique expectations for her.
I'm definitely going to document her progress and see how she blossoms. My only complaint is that this DNA test raises more questions than answers. My 2 biggest questions are how did I come into ownership of a horse with that DNA? And what in the world was a horse with this DNA doing in the area I found her!?
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I was of the opinion that DNA tests for breed can be wildly inaccurate @Margie and Magic , that they're only reliable to prove parentage when you have samples from the parents too. However that doesn't alter the fact that you were trying to get the wrong build with your feeding, and well done to you and your vet for recognising that. Is conditioning scoring common in the States? It's a useful way of avoiding this sort of problem and if you don't know much about it it's well worth looking up.
I am in the minority here. Yes I love foals, but not my own. It's nice to look at them and walk away from.
I would be horrified if the cob landed me with one.
Likewise. If Ben had a foal I really wouldn't be happy!
It's strange because a few did say would I ever breed from her. No, isn't my life complicated enough.
Conditioning score is common and when I brought her home she had a lean body score of 3 which is acceptable. This is just my preference but I like my horses to look in peak condition all year round and while they are of unknown pedigree I usually figure out what body type they should have and work towards that. So even though Hulaberry had a score of 3 her top line and hindquarters needed muscle built back up before I would ever consider riding her. Then factor in that I was thinking she should have more of a QH build and she looked even more awful to myself and the vet/my trainer. I don't know exactly how to explain it in horse terms but it reminds me of myself when younger. I was always skinny but I was skinny fat. Meaning even though I looked athletic and trim I had no muscle, no endurance and wasn't strong at all. As I got older and always had jobs that were manual labor I remained skinny but I was all muscle. I want my horses to be the same way, have a healthy body condition score but be athletic inside and out, not just "fit" by appearances.
As far as the accuracy of DNA tests its all in how you view it. In the last few years with all the track your ancestry and scientific breakthroughs, we've come to understand genetics/DNA is not passed along how it has always been taught: 50-50 split from parents to offspring. In actuality its all kinds of percentages, even among identical twins.
And since I don't have any history on Hulaberry going farther back then spring 2019 I know nothing of her parentage. DNA tests are accurate but you have to know how to logically look at the results and know before testing if the results will support the conclusions you are trying to draw and accept that they might not. The test I had done ONLY tells you the top 3 horse breeds that your horse shares the MOST DNA with. The different ways myself and others have been using this test is to determine what type of build our mystery horse should have, which can then help us figure out a more appropriate conditioning plan, others have been using it to determine if their mustangs are naturally inclined to breed specific disciplines. In theory you could also use the results to predict what sort of foals a stallion or mare of great conformation/mind but unknown parentage would throw.
In this situation we know Turkoman horses are extinct. Therefore Hulaberry's dam or sire was not a turkoman cross or pure blooded turkoman crossed with a holsteiner. There is no secret stash/secret breeding program of Turkoman horses in the US. This test ONLY accurately tells me what DNA specifically makes up Hulaberry.
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