11 minute read
“INSIDE” THE LAW
PERFORMANCE ALTERATION by Katherine Jarve
A couple of months ago, I discussed the unfortunate and chronic problem of equine drug use and abuse within the industry and the potential legal ramifications of such practice. Apparently, I am not the only one who has been interested in the subject.
My guess is that most, if not all, of you reading this article have heard of the new testing procedures being set forth by the American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA). The new testing program comes in the wake of a recent trend wherein horses’ necks have been altered to prevent head bobbing. It is no secret that some have used injectables, including those routinely used for human cosmetic procedures (i.e. Botox), to “fix” the necks of horses.
In the wake of this practice, AQHA announced a new performance alteration testing program, which uses thermographic imaging, palpation and neck flexion to determine if a horse’s neck has abnormal characteristics or functionality. The new testing procedures are intended to help protect the health and well-being of the American Quarter Horse by detecting minute differences in a horse’s thermal and neural condition. Thermographic imaging combined with objective palpation and flexion testing allows licensed veterinarians to quickly and efficiently identify trauma in the horse’s neck (and also other body parts).
The new performance alteration testing program was first implemented at the 2022 Farnam AQHA and Adequan Select World Championship Show this past November. According to the official press release from AQHA, all exhibitors qualified for finals in designated classes were required to have thermographic images taken of both sides of their horses’ neck prior to competing in the finals and finalists were tested at least one hour before their finals class in order to qualify for the competition. Refusal or failure to test would have resulted in the horse and exhibitor being disqualified from the finals. Additionally, following the finals, all horses sent for drug and tail testing were subject to having their necks palpated, flexed and thermographically imaged for the second time by an AQHA approved and American Association of Equine Practitioners member licensed veterinarian. This means that horses competing in the finals were tested a second time following the conclusion of the class.
Although AQHA’s rules regarding drugs and medications permit any horses on show grounds to be randomly selected for testing, the new testing program was a significant departure from the traditional practice of testing class winners at the World Shows. 2022 AQHA Guidelines Regarding the AQHA Equine Drugs and Medication Rule 7. The new performance alteration testing program is evidence of AQHA’s most recent step toward aggressively protecting the welfare of horses that compete in its sanctioned events. The immediate effect of the testing program at the World Shows was to disqualify exhibitors and horses with abnormal characteristics or functionality from competing in the finals; however, there may be additional consequences down the road for those whose horses may have failed the testing. Since AQHA prohibits the use of drugs and medications “that can affect a horse’s performance, disposition or appearance,” disqualified exhibitors may be subject to additional disciplinary sanctions beyond simply being disqualified from the finals. 2022 AQHA Guidelines Regarding the AQHA Equine
Thermographic imaging combined with objective palpation and flexion testing allows licensed veterinarians to quickly and efficiently identify trauma in the horse’s neck. Drugs and Medication Rule 2. Depending on a variety of factors, sanctions are likely to include fines, probation and/or suspension. The AQHA drug and medication rules are applicable to anyone who enters, shows, owns, trainer, cares for or delivers a horse to an AQHA-approved show and also permit disciplinary sanctions whether or not you had actual knowledge of the presence of or directly participated in the administration of the drug or altering activity. 2022 AQHA Guidelines Regarding the AQHA Equine Drugs and Medication Rule 8. Consequently, you could be subject to discipline whether or not you knew your horse was given an illegal substance or had its neck “fixed” to eliminate head bobbing. Katherine Jarve is a partner at the Marlton, New Jersey law firm of Jarve Kaplan Granato Starr, LLC. She is licensed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and maintains a practice in personal injury and civil litigation, including equine related issues. Katherine spent her childhood competing on the national AQHA show circuit. This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be legal advice. If you have a specific legal question or problem, consult with an experienced equine law attorney. Questions, comments or suggestions can be e-mailed to kjarve@nj-triallawyers.com.
ASSISTED REPRODUCTION by Katherine Unger Baillie
Successful equine in vitro fertilization remains stubbornly hard to achieve
Assisted reproduction has become an invaluable technique for horse owners hoping to pass on to another generation the characteristics of cherished and successful animals. But for decades, one of the most common methods used in assisted reproduction in humans and other animals - standard in vitro fertilization (IVF) – has been stubbornly difficult to achieve.
“It’s a frustrating thing,” said Katrin Hinrichs, professor of reproduction at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, who, alongside her other research programs, has tried for more than three decades to tackle conventional equine IVF, in essence, convincing a sperm to fertilize an egg in a Petri dish. “When we put horse sperm with eggs, they don’t even try to penetrate them. They just swim happily about ignoring the egg, leaving us with a zero-fertilization rate.”
Hinrichs and others have developed techniques to produce embryos using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a method of fertilization that requires the technically challenging injection of a single sperm into a single oocyte, or egg, aided by a high-power microscope and manipulation equipment. However, supporting sperm to achieve “true” IVF – in which sperm incubated in a Petri dish fertilize an oocyte without further manipulation, as they would naturally inside a mare – proved elusive.
Until now. Hinrichs and colleagues report in the journal Biology of Reproduction a major achievement in equine reproduction: a conventional IVF technique with a 90% fertilization rate, with 74% of the fertilized eggs giving rise to blastocysts, the rapidly dividing ball of cells that develops into the embryo and placenta. The three mares into which resultant embryos were transferred each carried healthy foals to term.
“The demand for assisted reproductive technologies like IVF is getting larger and larger in the horse breeding community,” Hinrichs said. “The approach we’ve developed would allow more veterinary practices to offer IVF, as it doesn’t require the expensive equipment and training needed to do it the way it’s done now, by injecting each sperm into each egg. But for me the fun part is just nailing this down. I’ve been a horse person all my life, and for decades we have tried to figure out why this doesn’t work in horses. And now we have a repeatable method that does work, so we can explore the ‘why.’” Threads of progress
Assisted reproduction in horses has been a focus of Hinrichs’ career. Her contributions to the field have earned her numerous awards, including the honor of being inducted into the Equine Research Hall of Fame recently. Her interest dates back to her training at Penn Vet, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1988, studying early equine pregnancy. Only a handful of years before, at Penn Vet’s New Bolton Center, the first calf produced by IVF had been born. “I worked with Virgil, the first IVF calf, when I was doing my residency here. There was a culture at Penn around studying IVF,” Hinrichs said. Toward the end of her doctoral studies, Hinrichs began working with unfertilized oocytes in horses, to
In one strategy, used for valuable mares unable to produce embryos, clinicians could extract an oocyte from the mare, surgically place it in the oviduct of a recipient mare, and then inseminate the recipient mare. determine how they influenced the outcome of IVF. In 1990, a group in France led by Eric Palmer reported the first live foal born from IVF. The researchers produced one additional foal the next year, then gave up working with the technique as they could not make it efficient or repeatable. Many other groups tried to develop equine IVF procedures and failed, also unable to establish something replicable. Other methods for assisted reproduction, producing foals from an unfertilized oocyte recovered from a donor mare, met with more success but were laborious. In one strategy, used for valuable mares unable to produce embryos, clinicians could extract an oocyte from the mare, surgically place it in the oviduct of a recipient mare, and then inseminate the recipient mare. While a faculty member at Tufts University, Hinrichs completed the first of these procedures for clinical use. “We were able to get pregnancies from isolated oocytes,” she said, “but the techniques involved were ponderous and invasive.” Another approach, which has been the most successful form of IVF in horses to date, is ICSI, using a tiny needle to pick up a sole sperm and inject it into an oocyte. In the early 2000s, Hinrichs, then at Texas A&M University, increased the efficiency of that procedure and developed methods to culture the resulting embryo in the laboratory until it could be easily transferred without surgery to a recipient mare. By around s2009, Hinrichs’ clinic offered this, and specialized facilities
ASSISTED REPRODUCTION (continued)
around the world continue to do so.
Still, Hinrichs kept pursuing the development of a simplified, conventional IVF procedure. After her lab had devoted considerable energy to studying oocytes, around 2011 she turned attention to the other party involved: sperm. For sperm to fertilize an egg they must undergo a series of physiological changes in a process known as capacitation. In 2019, a researcher in Hinrichs’ lab, Matheus Felix, now chief embryologist in the Penn Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory, began investigating how long it takes for horse sperm to capacitate and what conditions support that process.
Tying it together
The team had gathered clues that sperm from horses might need more time than that of other species, such as mice, to fertilize eggs. So they tried a longer-than-normal incubation. “Horse sperm are finicky and like to die in culture,” Hinrichs says, “but we had done some previous work that suggested factors that could prolong their life during incubation.”
When Felix employed a complex medium for incubating them, which contains the compounds penicillamine, hypotaurine, and epinephrine (PHE), the team finally found a way to keep sperm alive in culture for more than a few hours.
When Felix tried again, incubating the sperm overnight and then adding an oocyte, he documented signs of fertilization. “Because typical results in the horse are zero, this one fertilized oocyte was a sign that the process could work, and we were off on our journey to develop the procedure,” Hinrichs said.
“This work was really the result of an intersection of Matheus’ ideas on the time needed for capacitation and all of these little bits of information that had come through unsuccessful trials that we had done dating back all the way to the 1990s,” Hinrichs said. “Matheus’ dedication to getting it right was the vital factor in the final success of the project.”
Using the fledgling procedure as the basis for optimizing equine IVF, the research team found that pre-incubating the sperm for 22 hours in the PHE medium, then co-incubating it with oocytes for 3 hours, led to the greatest efficiency, including a 74% rate of production of blastocysts, three of which were transferred to mares that are part of the Penn Vet research herd. Three healthy foals were born as a result.
There is still room to improve on the methods, Hinrichs says. The approach only worked well with fresh sperm; frozen sperm, which is the most practical method for clinical IVF, did not result in impressive fertilization rates. And the PHE medium is cumbersome to make, meaning slight variations could compromise the procedure’s success.
“For the first time, we have a method that works, and we can use it as a basis to explore what it is that makes it work and what variations are possible: how to make the procedure simpler and more applicable to practice,” Hinrichs said.
Indeed, as satisfying as it is to have solved this decades-long puzzle, what excites Hinrichs most are the new questions it enables her and her group to interrogate.
“What’s been driving me for 30 years are these physiological questions that we don’t know the answer to,” she said. “What happens in a mare during fertilization? Why are equine sperm so resistant to procedures that work in other species? What do equine sperm need to capacitate? Do they have the same changes as do sperm of other species? These are the questions I find fascinating.”
Katherine Unger Baillie is a science news office at the University of Pennsylvania where she covers the School of Veterinary Medicine. You can email her at kbaillie@upenn.edu.
