p11-12 Talk Breeding Hurl Iss04
4/10/06
02:22
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hurlingham [ talk]
After driving a couple of hours south of Buenos Aires over roads pitted with holes so deep they could swallow your car whole, you come to a nondescript crossroads. Here there’s a turn on to a dusty lane that leads to just about the most perfect polo estancia imaginable, created by the Sultan of Brunei. I’m here. My guide, a veteran high-goal Argentine player named Marcelo Monteverde, takes me past the endless snooker-tablesmooth polo fields until at last we finally reach a line of stables that could easily be mistaken for a luxury health spa. We halt in front of a stall and my guide points his finger into the sweet-smelling shadows. ‘Beautiful pony,’ he says. ‘Speed of a rocket. Perfection,’ he whistles enviously in the direction of a sleek though smallish mare. Then he drops his voice further: ‘You know how much she is worth? You won’t believe me if I tell you. More than $100,000.’ Polo has never sold itself as a cheap game, but it will come as a shock to the uninitiated that a single animal can be worth such an enormous sum of money. And although this scene took place in the heart of Argentina, it could as easily have been in Australia, where the Packer-owned Ellerston operation has recently been snapping up ponies for up to $150,000. You could spend even more money on a half-decent yearling racehorse, of course, but on a polo pony? British players will tell you that an exceptional young animal can usually be had at home for no more than £20,000. The reason for this discrepancy in cost can be summed up in just one word:
breeding is believing It’s only three years since the birth of the first cloned horse, but a revolution is underway. So just how much progress has been made among the brave new attempts to produce the perfect polo pony? WORDS SANDY MITCHELL
breeding. And the breeding of ponies such as the prime specimen in the Brunei estancia is undergoing a revolution driven entirely by science. We’re looking at a near-future where cloning and sex selection will produce the ultimate in highly sought-after polo ponies. Professor ‘Twink’ Allen, Britain’s leading equine reproduction expert and director of Newmarket’s Equine Fertility Unit, explains the difference science is already making: ‘The Argentines realised that you just can’t rely on throw-out racehorses to produce a decent polo pony. You need an animal bred and especially selected for the job.’ The solution was to invest in biotechnology so that eggs could be harvested from the most promising donor mares, fertilised artificially with the semen of a very carefully chosen stallion, and the resulting embryos grown in the wombs of workaday recipient mares. ‘As soon as their major competition ends in Buenos Aires, all the good mares go straight off to stud for three or four months, where their embryos are collected and then transferred. They’re doing embryo transfers
in very large numbers,’ says Professor Allen. And the Argentines are not alone. There are breeders in several other countries, such as Australia, who have developed their own embryo-transfer operations on a vast scale. This is only the beginning of the new wave of changes in reproductive technology that will transform breeding and widen the gap yet further between the best polo ponies and the average in Britain. Sex-selection using new spinning-semen techniques to produce foals of the desired gender are already possible with around 95 per cent accuracy, and genetic cloning to reproduce treasured ponies has finally arrived. Yet it’s been a bare three years since Professor Pieraz Pioggia Cesare successfully cloned the first horse to international acclaim. The foal, named Prometea, and produced in Italy by a university-based reproductive technology laboratory, was a carbon copy of its mother – a Haflinger mare. Back then, cloning techniques were far from reliable: out of more than 800 embryos involved in the experiment, only Promotea
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