Stallions neg for ECVM?

[ElementFarm]

Anyone know of stallions who’ve been radiographed and are negative for ECVM?

After my last homebred was xrayed (due to some quirks and training challenges) and found to be affected unilaterally at C6 and C7, I’m admittedly paranoid about this condition. I hear in Europe some insurance companies won’t cover horses unless they have confirmed negative rads, and some stallions are being marketed as ECVM negative, just like with WFFS or EVA. But I haven’t seen any indications of this in the US.
I have a lovely mare (ECVM neg) I’m hoping to breed this spring, but only to a stallion I know doesn’t have it.
Bonus for stallions approved AHS. Thanks.

[beowulf]

Just responding to bump this up visibility wise. It’s a good question and the verified negative stallions deserve additional exposure.

ECVM has such broad spectrum in terms of clinical presence and physical symptoms. Some horses with the malformation don’t seem affected. At this point I wonder if wholesale culling is the answer or if it’s somewhere in the middle. This malformation has existed for centuries and probably originated in an early ancestor of the modern horse. We probably need more research into the malformation and correlation with physical symptoms.

Having been involved in many PPEs I’ve seen some degree of malformation present in most horses, particularly WBs - but my observation could be skewed because most people aren’t doing extensive PPEs on a grade horse.

What’s the breeding of your ECVM negative mare?

[SusanO]

Since there is no confirmed ECVM gene I think the best you can do is stick to stallions that have competed to the highest levels and continue to stay at that level for a while. If you use the newer “flavor of the month” stallion who competes at young horse levels and then retires to breeding you will never know if he has the longevity of soundness to pass on. That includes malformations that may or may not affect performance. No guarantees in horses, alas.

[Railbird]

KWPN requires it as of recently for stallion approvals, so you may be well served looking at young Dutch stallions. I may or may not do my boy- it will depend how he does training this winter and whether I think he’s likely to be ready for the IBOP next year.

[ElementFarm]

That’s great to know about KWPN, I’ll look into that, thanks @Railbird

@SusanO, true there’s no identified ‘gene’ for it, but it does seem to be more prevalent in certain lines, and it just makes sense to avoid those lines if I can.

From talking to a lot of people who are becoming experts in ECVM, the issue is that the rads only show the malformation, but the malformation isn’t, necessarily in itself, the problem. The way I understand it, the malformation can cause the soft tissue to be attached in the wrong places. One body worker I use participated in a necropsy of an ECVM horse, and reported that the ligaments and muscles were literally twisted around eachother and every time that horse moved, it had to have been very uncomfortable/painful.
So when we look at Xrays, we can only see the malformation not the soft tissue. So if the tendons/ligaments/muscles are only minimally impacted, that horse can have a performance career. But in some of those horses, the stability is impacted to the point where it’s directly painful or the compensatory behavior causes injury/unsoundness in other parts of the body.

With my homebred, she was born very prematurely and spent the first several weeks of her life in the University clinic’s ICU. She was not fully developed, and we knew there could be some physical limitations from her rough start. However, the mare is stunning-- a lovely mover with a natural hunter jump. But we were plagued with training challenges from the start. She will walk trot all day but sometimes she just doesn’t want to canter. We’d injected, stretched, body worked, tried multiple trainers, and even tried a discipline change for awhile. We might have zero issues with canter and jumping for a few months, but then all of the sudden the wheels would come off again. Knowing the likely underlying cause is heartbreaking, since there’s nothing we can really do to remedy, but it has answered a lot of questions. I let the mare tell me what she wants to do, or doesn’t, and we might go a few weeks without cantering at all. But she loves to have a job and hack out, so we do whatever she’s comfortable with. It’s sad, because she was supposed to be my next AO hunter, and she sure looks the part.
But it is what it is, and it’ll be interesting to see how things develop with prevention and protocols as we learn more about the condition. In the meantime, I’ll do neck rads on any future PPEs, and give my business to stallion owners who are informed and open about their stallions’ status.