Pick the Sex of Your Foal
In the ranch horse business geldings bring top dollar, so imagine what it would mean if breeders could pick the sex of their foals. Open Range will be back after the break. Commencing in the 2010 breeding season horse breeders can have stallion semen commercially sorted allowing them to pick the sex of their foals. Will this be good for the industry? My initial thought was that it would disrupt the natural balance but those advocating the use of sexed semen believe that it wouldn’t have much impact as breeders breed for their unique markets, in some segments of the industry, like roping, colts fetch top dollar. Others disciplines want fillies and in many like eventing or dressage it’s personal preference. The ability of breeders to select the sex of the foal might actually mean less unwanted horses because they could produce more marketable foal crops. It would also be easier to market stallion breedings if you could predict the sex and there is the fact that some bloodlines simply produce better stallions, other lines better mares. Because the stallion determines the sex of the foal researchers at Sexing Technologies discovered it was fairly simple given the proper sperm cell to pix the sex. So Sexing Technologies and Equine Reproduction Innovations teamed up to offer this process commercially using an innovative machine that sorts sperm cells, and they guaranteeing a 95 percent success rate. I still worry about implications of this technology not only for horses but humans. I’m Susan Allen