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When horses colic, time is not on your side. Minutes matter, and often both veterinarian and owner must make quick decisions the veterinarian about treatment and the owner about the financial risk and reward of paying for those treatments. Moving from field management to referral hospital, and potentially surgery, can improve a horse’s chance of surviving but isn’t an option for all owners.
Fortunately, up to 90% of horses respond to on-farm treatment for colic, said Anthony Blikslager, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVS, who heads the clinical sciences department and is a professor of equine surgery and gastroenterology at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Blikslager shared his decision tree for managing colicking horses in the field during the 2020 American Association of Equine Practitioners’ Convention, held virtually.
Contact time between sperm and uterus.
Additionally, it increases conception rates for some mares and/or stallions.
The Study Goals
Among the study’s goals was determining the best time interval to lavage for quelling inflammation after deep horn insemination without negatively impacting pregnancy rates. Previous studies using standard AI had demonstrated much lower conception rates if veterinarians performed lavage sooner than four hours post-breeding. While working on her master’s thesis at Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto, Argentina, Sofia Kovácsy hypothesized this would hold true for DHAI, as well. However, the result surprised her research team when it didn’t.