Are there any major risks with pasture breeding? I’m looking at breeding an older mare to a locally based stallion. One owner offers the choice of live cover or AI. Another owner offers pasture breeding only. Both stallions ride and drive and are very well trained so are about equal performance wise.
Pasture breeding: definitely the most effective. But it works best when the mare and stallion already live with each other, because placing two new horses together, regardless of gender, comes with risks galore. It’s the least labor intensive method.
Live cover: very effective. But, I will add the caveat that the level of safety depends on the handlers and their facilities. Taking a mare to a professional breeding shed with an experienced team- very safe. Taking a mare to someone’s driveway while Bubba is holding the stallion’s lead rope with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other… not so much.
AI: there’s nothing wrong with AI at all. It has so many conveniences. You can do it at home without shipping horses. But there’s a lot more that can go wrong (low motility, FedEx screws you over, you miss ovulation, etc.) and it almost always drives up your expenses as a mare owner. These days, a lot of mare owners have only ever dealt with AI.
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I agree entirely with Texarkana. I have owned and stood 2 TB stallions. No AI. Hand breeding mostly, but as my second stallion got older, and I knew his ways well, and he was always a complete gentleman and polite, he also pasture bred successfully. No one got hurt. Mares got pregnant. For pasture breeding, the human has to watch carefully to get a date of last cover, to be able to know projected foaling date. Which is not a problem.
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Preach it. Years ago I was holding a mare for breeding, nothing fancy definitely backyard, owner lost control of the stud, who promptly ran full tilt at the mare and jumped her. I was huddled under her neck trying to stay away from his hooves…
Never again.
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Hopefully she caught!
