Canadian breeders producing quality foals - North American horse owners may not be aware that Canada is the home of Linwood Ranch, an equine breeding facility that has generated peer reviewed research in recent years on subjects such as equine behaviour, equine welfare, stall design, and the requirements for lying down time for healthy horses. Linwood Ranch is a PMU or “pregnant mare urine” ranch in Manitoba, and is also where active research is conducted on many equine welfare issues affecting all of our horses.

Research from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has demonstrated that a chromosomal defect is responsible for a significant proportion of horse pregnancies that fail within the first two months of development. These findings will pave the way for new diagnostic tests for what could be one of the most common causes of pregnancy loss in mares.

A poll on HORSEJournals.com asked the question: Should equines be cloned? Some 83 percent of respondents said no, not until more research has been done; 15 percent said maybe, in special situations with strict parameters; just two percent said yes, and that registration of clones should be allowed.

“I used to build props and worked in film and television production, and I had a shop in my garage at home,” says Russ Gray, cofounder of Veterinary Simulator Industries (VSI) in Calgary, Alberta. “My neighbour was the dean for the University of Calgary’s new Veterinary School. He knew that I built weird things, so he asked me if I could build the back end of a cow just to garner some interest for the new school at the agricultural fair in Calgary. He wanted the back end of three cows so that kids could reach up into the rectum and palpate a calf’s head. I contacted my business partner, Bryan Pfahl, and we created them for him. At the time we were doing all kinds of jobs for science centres and things like that during the course of our careers, so we just took it on as another project.”