But the mare felt pregnant. I had learned to palpate mares 10 years before portable ultrasound had been invented, so I learned the “feel” long before I learned what they looked like on the very expensive 6-inch black-and-white TV screen. (My first one cost more than a new truck.) Without ultrasound, I would have called her pregnant, and that would’ve been the end of the story. But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, this is not the end of the story.

Illustration by Madison Seamans, DVM

Making a Baby

Mrs. Barbara Goodrich had contacted me in the early spring, asking about the possibility of breeding her mare artificially. She had her eye on a real fancy, blue-blooded stallion in Colorado, but didn’t want to take the mare on a long, expensive trip.

I told her we could help her avoid the trailer ride by using shipped, fresh-cooled semen and artificial insemination, but it wasn’t cheap, and timing was critical. They weren’t going to send a sample in a pickle jar that we could just use when we had time. The mare had to be in heat, the semen had to be placed in her uterus, and she had to ovulate within 48 hours.

Fertility is not a function of how many times the mare is bred. One time is sufficient if it is the right time. Of course, if we didn’t want the mare to conceive, she could get pregnant any time—especially by the fence-jumping 2-year-old down the road that should have been gelded at birth—but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I went on to explain that the entire process could take several visits, and the synchronization of several factors was critical. We made an appointment for the following week.

After examining the mare, I told Mrs. Goodrich that we were very lucky: if we could have a sample in 48 hours, I thought the mare would be ready. I stressed how fortunate we were, as it seldom happened so quickly. I thought to myself that it might be a sign that this case would be easy.

I was wrong.

Hiding Out

“The next step is for you to call the stallion owner and have the semen shipped to you,” I told her. “If you can call me when it arrives, I can be here within a couple of hours.”

The sample arrived as scheduled, and the insemination was uneventful.

It’s always a good idea to recheck the mare in 48 hours to ensure ovulation, and this mare did so, exactly as predicted. Though the whole process started out dang near textbook perfect, it didn’t stay that way.

I recommend the first ultrasound on day 14 after ovulation. This will usually—and the key word here is usually—tell us if she is pregnant or coming back into heat. An exam at this early date also helps us manage twin pregnancies more easily. Although twins sound like a cheap way to expand your herd, they almost always end in disaster.

Before I place the ultrasound probe in the right location (this requires a long plastic sleeve, a lot of nerve, and a very cooperative patient), I feel the cervix and uterus. In a mare during early pregnancy, the cervix feels like a pencil and the uterus feels like a banana or large sausage.

That is the way this mare felt, but the image on the screen suggested my fingers were either lying to me or they were thinking about something else. The embryo is about the size of a quarter by 14 days, and the uterus is about the size of a large banana, so there ain’t a lot of room to hide.

However, these sneaky rascals have occasionally played hide and seek with me, and I just can’t find ‘em. In mares that really feel pregnant, I like to scan again in a couple of days. This often results in the good news that the mare is, indeed, pregnant. On this occasion, however, this was not going to happen.

Storming Off

Mrs. Goodrich was beyond disappointed—she was livid.

“I can’t believe I spent all this money…” (I think her bill totaled about $250 at that point, unbelievably cheap, even 25 years ago) “…and you can’t see anything on this stupid machine!”

I told her again how fortunate we were that things had gone this smoothly, and that I was fairly confident we would see the embryo in two days.

Nope.

“I can’t believe I thought we could actually do this artificially in the first place,” she fumed (the smoke alarm in the barn was just about to go off). “I am going to take her to Colorado and let things happen naturally. It’s what I should have done in the first place!”

So she did.

The Math’s Not Mathing

Three months later, I got a call from the farm manager at the blue-blood stallion station in Danglongwaysfromhere, Colorado.

“Mrs. Goodrich brought us a mare a few months back and listed you as the vet of record,” he started, “but she said she had already spent a FORTUNE with you and didn’t want to spend another dime on unnecessary vet bills. We have been teasing this mare every other day for about three months, but she hasn’t showed the slightest interest in our stallion. I thought I’d find out if you did something to bring her in heat. Mrs. Goodrich was fairly adamant about ‘no vets.’”

I told him the condensed version of the story and that maybe another exam would be helpful. He called me back in a few hours with the news that his vet had examined her and said she was in foal—about 90 days!

Sometimes just one more try will give us a victory. It’s not like we had been breeding this mare for six cycles with no luck; we had been very fortunate with the timing of the whole process.

But let’s think about Mrs. G’s decision. One more ultrasound exam would have cost her about $50. Instead, she took a week off work, drove 1,200 miles to Colorado—twice—to deliver and retrieve her mare, paid for 90 days board, and eventually another vet exam anyway to determine the mare was pregnant all along.

With that exercise in economics, I’m sure she has a promising future in politics.

This edition of The Village Horse Doctor appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Horse Illustrated magazine. Click here to subscribe!

The post The Village Horse Doctor: Will She or Won’t She? appeared first on Horse Illustrated Magazine.

Photo by Annette Seamans

A stiff, new white smock, a stethoscope and a necktie are an unlikely set of items in the context I recall from over 40 years ago. The undergraduate years, those needed to complete the prerequisite courses, were five years of just plain hard. They included history, chemistry, physics, and the ever-popular calculus. (To this day I still don’t understand the need for calculus. I have never once, in over 40 years of practice, needed to know the area under a curve!)

It took me seven years to get in. Once I heard some guy in a movie say, “In the end, it will be OK, and if it’s not OK, then it’s not the end.” Perseverance is a virtue, but seven years is rapidly approaching stupid. I learned a lot during that time.

For example, after applying to veterinary college, there are only two things that can happen; both come in the U.S. Mail. One of them is bad. A skinny letter is a basic, boiler-plate form letter that has all the compassion of an IRS audit. It starts out: “Blah, blah, blah, there were many qualified applicants …” and ends, “BUT YOU AIN’T ONE OF THEM!” Or something to that effect. I have several of them.

The fat letter is the one you’re looking for. It’s fat because it has the registration packet enclosed. It took a long time to get mine.

The First Day

Summer in College Station, Texas is hot and humid. The mosquitoes are about the size of small chickens and are more like flying piranhas than insects. September isn’t much different, but at least there’s football. That doesn’t improve the climate any, but it holds the promise that cooler fall weather is near.

So wearing a stiff new shirt and a tie under an equally stiff new white smock was not the most comfortable attire on that muggy September morning in 1981. But it was the first day of vet school, so some compromise was in order.

Forged in Fire

Room 5 was a large classroom with a stadium-like atmosphere, sans cheerleaders, seating about 200. The lower doors opened directly to the parking lot and the site of many first introductions among my classmates.

The first day was … a bit strained. The atmosphere was a complicated mixture of camaraderie and competition, confidence and complete panic—like the car-chasing dog that finally does catch one: Now what?

It was tougher than you’d think. We had two or three drop out during the first year, and one at the end of the third. Later though, most of the faculty and staff admitted that our group was special. The class of 1985 had an intangible “something” that set us apart from others. We were close. We were friendly. We were a team.

Those four years forged friendships, and a few marriages, that would last a lifetime—and some that didn’t. I remember the first day, not because of some inspiring professorial oration about the joy of academic achievements and saving lives, but because of a motorcycle—or rather, because of the guy riding it.

Biker Eddie

Several of us were standing in the parking lot outside Room 5, stiff from the combination of new shirts and attitudes that straddle a vague line somewhere between smug and abject terror. (There was a dress code at A&M then—ties for boys and dresses for girls. Students who failed to comply would be excused from class).

Into this rather rigid scene, a most unlikely addition was about to loosen things up a bit. His first name was one of those that the bearer doesn’t like, so they go by a middle name. In this case, he wanted to be called Eddie. The mere mention of his first name … well, nobody did that more than just the one time.

So, a few of us were standing outside Room 5 in acceptable apparel waiting with guarded anxiety for the 8 o’clock bell to mark the start of a new adventure.

The relative stillness of that first morning was broken by the roar of a large motorcycle, a Harley “chopper.” It was ridden by an equally large, almost mythic character who was to become a most unlikely, though truly loved, leader of our class.

The sight of this Arnold Schwarzenegger-as-Conan clone, clad in a new white smock flapping irreverently in the wake of his Harley, tie loosely knotted in a flippant, half-mast style, certainly broke the ice. This giant stepped off his bike with easy grace and introduced himself. He was not cocky or rough; he just grinned and stuck out his
hand irresistibly.

Eddie would be elected class president not once, but twice. An NFL prospect, he left training camp with the Atlanta Falcons to spend an amazing four years with us at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. He was just one of many friends I made during my time there.

Reality Check

Promptly at 8 a.m., the bell rang and the brand-new members of the college of veterinary medicine entered the hallowed halls just beneath the ivory towers of vaunted academia. The introductory lecture, hosted by several faculty members, was unsettling. The basic message was: “Yesterday, y’all were all A students. Them days are gone. Most of y’all will survive academically, some will not.”

The silence in that room was deafening.

The final blow to our collective egos was: “The anatomy lab will be open on Saturdays.” As brilliant, amazingly successful students, none of us thought any extra study on weekends would be required. That attitude was reversed, coincidentally, on the Saturday following the first anatomy exam.

What followed was the most challenging, maddening, joyous four years imaginable. A normal course load was considered 15 or 16 semester hours. Vet school was 22. That gave you just enough extra time to eat, but sleep was to be rationed out in small increments. I guess they figured we could sleep after graduation or death which, at times, seemed perilously imminent. Despite all the unbelievable work, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Stay curious, there’s more to follow.

This first edition of The Village Horse Doctor appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Horse Illustrated magazine. Click here to subscribe!

The post The Village Horse Doctor: School’s in Session appeared first on Horse Illustrated Magazine.