Originally Posted by
thesushitrain
why dont we just officially bring the season forward?
[vvv] g'day tst. When it was moved to september 1st it was definitely done for reasons of fertility/increased conception rates.
The study that was done on getting mares in foal, the one which supports that move, still exists somewhere or other and is just as relevant today as it was when it was first done. A vet did it (her name escapes me) and she was as sharp as a tack as i recall.
The fact is that the majority of mares don't start to cycle until around now anyway & even then many of those are not up & rolling in any meaningful way to the point that they can be successfully served.
I pg'd a couple of dry mares on monday to put them through their paces so our vet could pre-breeding check them tomorrow morning, make sure that they were clean & healthy and ready to go and then we'll serve them when they come around naturally in the last week of september. Barring illness, accident or injury we'll get both of them ptif in one or two shots. Come the end of october/1st week of november they'll be done & dusted.
Solves a few problems brought up in the breeders panel paper
1, mares can be served an extra time for the end of the season = more foals on the ground out of quality mares that would otherwise miss
[vvv] perhaps but if you start up at the end of september and you're still swining at the old bat come the end of january there's something drastically wrong.
2, give an advantage to domestically based stallions who dont have to come back from america
[vvv] pay that one....big-time, certainly at least as far as locally bred sires go anyway. Very good idea. That being said, the problem we have at this point in time is that the majority of the best sires are still shuttle duty conveyances. In the years to come however, when we have set about the task of locally producing more of our own sires, for sure.
3, the foals born are probably going to be dropped pretty close to the same dates (if the study cited by pepper tree is factual)
[vvv] i can't see how that would ever happen. They'll get sprayed out across as much time as they're given to foal down. Some will go early, some will go late, some will go on time. Last season i remember eliteblood had a mare go a full 12 months ++++, we had one go 10 months & 3 weeks & a couple of days.