11/01/2022
I’m going to step up onto my breeding soapbox for just a moment so bear with me. This is a little long but is an educational post for everyone :)
One of the most common things thrown around when discussing stallions is semen quality, and understandably so. Every mare owner wants the best shot at getting their mare in foal, especially on the first try because expenses add up fast.
More often than not, people ask about and discuss a number called progressive motility. Progressive motility is essentially the percent of s***m cells that swim correctly and can fertilize an egg. This number is less than the total motility, which is the percent of s***m cells that are motile, or moving. This includes s***m cells with crooked tails that spin in circles and cannot fertilize an egg. So typically you’ll hear or read things like “Stallion X’s semen is 65% progressively motile”, and what I’ve found unfortunate in the industry is that is what most people go by when determining how fertile a stallion is. So so so many times, a stallion will get crossed off a mare owner’s list solely for being a “lower progressive motility” stallion, because it is believed that they will have a much harder time getting their mare in foal to that stallion which is not the case when managed properly.
Progressive motility however is only one part of the equation. What progressive motility tells the vet and team processing the semen into breeding doses is how to do their job. There are steps involved to analyze the raw semen, and calculations based on the data that determine how to mix it all up into a proper breeding dose. The industry standard for a shipped breeding dose is 1 billion progressively motile s***m cells. So whether the progressive motility of a stallion is 30% or 80%, a correctly prepared shipped breeding dose will have 1 billion cells either way, and doses that were prepared using lower progressively motile s***m will also be processed a bit differently to remove the junk within it so that the mare won’t have as much to clear post breeding. That is unfortunately not often discussed among mare owners and many just get stuck on the progressive motility itself.
So as a mare owner, what questions should you be asking? Most importantly over the progressive motility, is the data on how many mares were bred versus how many were confirmed in foal for a season. Terry Bradshaw Quarter Horses posts publicly every year about how many were bred, and how many got in foal, and it is a fantastic idea because it’s far more telling than what the progressive motility is.
Now, once a semen shipment leaves the stallion station, it is out of their hands. You never know how the team on the mare side is really managing the mare so sometimes mares end up open due to human error. Other times, mares are just mares and like to mess things up all on their own even when managed perfectly. The more mares bred, the higher chances for some to be open at the end of it as well. But statistically what you want to see is high conception rates. That will tell you more about your chances at getting your mare in foal than anything else will.
So for inquiring minds, below is a breakdown of the data for mares we bred this year. It includes our mares and mares we shipped to. We could not be more grateful for such an amazing team managing our boys and having the knowledge and skill to do it right so that not only are we successful getting ours in foal, but mare owners that choose to breed to our boys can have as easy a time as possible getting their mares in foal too.
