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By Betsy Parker
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
When Robert Miller shipped his prize Quarter Horse mare Rappahannock County last spring, he was steeled for disappointment.
Zippo’s Tammy Te carries world champion pleasure horse blood in her sturdy chestnut body, but at 21, the aging mare’s conception rate was already spotty — just four foals from nine years of breeding, and a failed pregnancy the previous year, gave Miller pause.
Perhaps Tammy’s broodmare career was over, he thought sadly.
Still, the Tfexas family practitioner had high hopes.
He researched the newest breakthroughs in horse breeding, selecting Equine Reproduction Concepts for its world-renown in the relatively new science of embryo transfer.
The state-of-the-art facility on Hackley’s Mill Road north of Amissville is owned by Dr. Kevin Dippert. It was designed specifically for that purpose by Warrenton architect J. Tucker.
Embryo transfer is a complex procedure in which a donor mare is impregnated, the resulting embryo flushed from her body and surgically placed in a recipient mare, who then carries the pregnancy to term.
This is still a delicate specialty in the developing world of veterinary medicine.
It seemed like a good plan for the aging Tammy — she produces the egg, and hence the genetic material, but another younger mare carries the foal.
When Dr. Dippert first began working with Tammy last spring, he said that the mare’s owner was clear about his wishes: He would like to get as many foals from Tammy through the embryo transfer program as possible.
He also didn’t want her bred past July, leaving Dippert and the ERC team just over four months to obtain one, or more, pregnancies.
With the use of short cycling procedures — standard in the breeding industry to induce a mare into heat earlier than her usual 28-day cycle — Dippert predicted that he could get seven or eight viable cycles from Tammy within the time frame.
Soon after Tammy arrived at the quiet ERC facility, she was given a prostiglandin shot to induce a heat
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