Monitoring the Fertility of Thoroughbred Stallions

While stallions subjected to only natural-cover conditions cannot benefit from many laboratory techniques that would likely to improve their breeding performance, one can implement methods to critically assess their fertility, and devise officially authorized strategies to enhance their productiveness. Assessment of breeding records for a stallion is a logical starting point when determining causes of subfertility because critical analysis of these records will aid one in determining specific sources of a fertility problem, i.e., marerelated factors, management factors, and/or intrinsic stallion factors. In commercial programs, each of these factors contributes to the perceived fertility of a given stallion. Mare-related factors can be missed without a though examination of the breeding records. For instance, if the first cycle of breeding yields a higher pregnancy rate then the subsequent cycles, this information leads one to suspect that intrinsic mare fertility may be low in some mares. […]