Possibly a silly question

I have been looking at some sites and see embryos offered for sale! I am fairly new to the horse owning world but this really blows my mind, how is this done?

The embryo is flushed from one mare and then transferred into another mare. Some mares have a hard time carrying a foal to term, so they came up with this process so that they could breed a mare then have a different mare carry the foal.

Desperate horsewife is correct. But, you can lose the embryo in the transferring process, or it may not implant. Then you lose your foal. Personally I wouldnt do it. But, I don't show.

Very true, but again I wouldn't do it!!

They also do this with high quality mares in Friesians. If there is a special horse, they can get more babies from (not much down time from being pregnant and having a foal) her if they transplant her embryos into another broodmare. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I guess it could help improve some bloodlines but to be honest... something just doesn't sit right with me.

A friend of mine did this with her mare. She didn't want to postpone her training, so had the embryo transplanted into a surrogate mare. It worked really well for her and she got a fabulous foal without missing a competition on her girl.

Cost a fair bit from memory though

:o Yeh it sure does!! The natural way is better though, wouldn't do it any other way

It is my understanding that you can only register one foal a year though, whether it is "natural" or surrogate. What would be the point of spending all that $$ for an unregistered foal?

TxHorseMom--maybe for Friesians, but not for QHs. Multiple foals from a single mare are allowed to be registered each year by AQHA.

I just looked that up to comfirm, and you're correct. I didn't realize they changed the rules. (I only "natural" breed) That new rule opens a whole new can of worms, doesn't it?