Jessica Jahiel's HORSE-SENSE Newsletter Archives

Breed early or later?

From: Frances

Hi Jessica! I totally love your Horse Sense list. This is my first question to you because you mostly answer my questions while I am still thinking about them!

My husband and I are going to breed our mares next year, and we are having an argument about when we should do it. We want to breed them to the same stallion (they are Foxtrotters and so is he) and we have a nice big pasture to keep the mares and foals in, where the mares live now. My husband says that horses need to be born really early in the spring or they are too weak to handle the next winter, so we need to make a date to breed the mares in February so that the babies would be born in January. From what I have read, that's how a lot of big stables do it. But our vet says that mares and stallions are more fertile later in the spring and we could breed our mares in April or May or even in June! I like the idea of breeding in May because April is about the earliest it gets nice around here, sometimes real winter runs clear to the end of March. What's your advice?

Frances (and Bill and the mares)

Hi Frances! Thanks, and my advice is that you listen to your vet. If you're not planning a racing career for your foals, and if you aren't planning to back them at fourteen months and show them in Futurities (horrors!), there is no earthly reason to breed the mares in February, and a lot of good reasons to wait. As your vet says, fertility goes UP, quite drastically, in spring and early summer. Breeding very early in the year sometimes requires help from lights and hormone injections, and the mares are less likely to "take" on a single cover. Later in the spring or early summer, during the natural breeding season, everything is much easier.

If your husband is worried about an eight-month-old foal (born in May) handling a winter, you can reassure him that the foals will handle winter much better at that age than they will as newborns in February, especially if you have hard winters that last until the end of March. You don't want to have tiny foals out in winter weather -- and you don't want to keep tiny foals indoors, either, as they will be MUCH healthier outdoors. All logic points to breeding later and having the foals born in late spring. ;-)

Jessica

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