ITBA hosted its annual Autumn/Winter Veterinary Seminar this week will over 100 in attendance, online and in-person at ITBA HQ. This year’s topic looked at preparing for the coming breeding season and welcomed talks from the Irish Equine Centre, Dr Barbara Murphy and Dr Bena Hickey.
Shane Browne started off the seminar with an overview of the different packages on offer from the Irish Equine Centre, with a focus on starting testing early before the season begins and the importance of hygiene for young foals.
Dr Murphy followed with a talk recently given at ISER Conference in Brazil as part of the global education programme for veterinarians and covered the importance of light for breeding stock. This included barren mares, pregnant mares, foals and stallions, and the presentation delved into the benefits of light including early cyclicity, on-time foaling, and earlier post-foal ovulations for pregnant and barren mares. Benefits for foals include improved maturity and higher foal birth weights, and stallions under correct lighting showed higher testosterone, higher early season sperm production and improved coat condition.
Dr Hickey wrapped up the seminar with a presentation on getting mares in foal and dealing with tricky mares. She emphasised the importance of starting early to try fix problems and the various veterinary interventions that can assist breeders for the coming season.
This brings a close to the ITBA Education Programme for 2023 and ITBA would like to thank all speakers who took part.
The ITBA 2023 Autumn/Winter Veterinary Seminar has been kindly co-funded by Department of Agriculture under its 2023 Equine Technical Support Schemes.