Quote Originally Posted by triplev123 View Post
Early on in the piece I don't believe anywhere near enough credence was given to selecting the right recipient mare. IMO it's not only their size but their temperament & their age that come into play big-time. Above all else, I'd be very interested in the size of foals a potential recipoent mare leaves. Some big mares leave moderately sized foals, some smaller mares will leave big foals & so on. If for some reason we had to carry out an ET I'd seriously consider going as far as supplying our own recipient mare, one that we knew all about beforehand.
Angus McKinnon, Australia's most acknowledged authority on the subject of equine reproduction, once told me not to get hung up about the size of the surrogate. Research had shown that, while there is a relationship between the size of the surrogate mare and the size of the foal at birth, genetics takes over and the foal will eventually grow to the size that is determined by its genes. That is, there is no advantage in using a 16.2 hands surrogate over one that is 15 hands.
Triplev, you could consider supplying your own recipient mare but that would add another complication into the procedure. When performing an ET it is necessary to transfer the embryo into a surrogate that is at a similar stage of her breeding cycle as the donor mare. The veterinary practices that regularly perform ET's have a paddock full of surrogates that they are scanning all the time and they will pick one that is very closely aligned in her breeding cycle. Although drugs can assist in the timing of when a mare comes into season and ovulates they are not clockwork and trying to align the cycle of one donor mare with one recipient would jeopardize the success rate of the procedure and possibly add to the cost.