THE WEXFORD LADY IS A WORKING MUM

In the last two weeks The Wexford Lady (no. 17) has become a mother. Not once but three times courtesy of three surrogate mares who have given birth to successful embryo transfers. The 14-year-old mare, one of ten competing at this year’s Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials, now has six offspring and has carried on competing throughout.

The recent arrivals are all fillies which has delighted ‘Letty’s’ owners and breeders Vin and Elizabeth Jones of Preci-Spark. “Just what we wanted,” said Elizabeth. “They will be our future broodmares.” One of the fillies is by the dual purpose sport horse Catherston Liberator who competed to Prix St Georges in dressage and advanced level in eventing. The other two are full sisters being by the Jones first homebred stallion the four-year-old Treffry, a son of the French Thoroughbred Hand In Glove. “What is quite cute is that all of her offspring seem to have inherited her floppy bottom lip,” said Sarah Cohen who had a lively ride on The Wexford Lady this morning to score 65.6pen.

Vin and Elizabeth’s stud are expecting a total of 17 foals this year – eight of which are the result of embryo transfer – a procedure that literally transfers the embryo when it is eight days old from the mare to be bred from into a surrogate mare who then carries the embryo to term.

This year the Beaufort Embryo Transfer Centre is offering the prize of an embryo transfer to the breeder of the highest placed British bred horse. The clinic, which is based at Westonbirt near Tetbury, is run by British vet Emma Tomlinson in conjunction with Argentine vet Dr Fernando Riera one of the World’s leading specialists in this field.