From $500 Craigslist cast-off to champion, Penn Vet’s Equine Assisted Reproduction program helps create a legacy
Sunny the mare’s offspring were born through embryo transfer with the help of the New Bolton Center's Penn Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory.
2 min. read
Fylicia Barr was a horse-crazy kid with not much money but high hopes. Sunny was a wild young mare with no training—just a load of sass and ideas of her own. The first time Barr met Sunny, the mare kicked her. But at $500 on Craigslist, the price was rock bottom for the equestrian world.
Fylicia Barr, with her mare Sunny’s youngest foal, Piper, at about five months old.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Vet)
As a young adult, Barr and her irrepressible mare went charging into the highly competitive world of championship three-day eventing, an equestrian triathlon of dressage, cross-country, and show jumping. The pair won the prestigious four-star Jersey Fresh International Three-Day Event in 2019, and competed in the five-star Land Rover Kentucky Three-Day Event.
Regina Turner, now professor emerita in the Section of Large Animal Reproduction and Behavior at Penn Vet’s New Bolton Center, had known Barr for years. She also knew plenty about special horses. An expert in equine reproduction, she had worked with numerous highly competitive sport horse mares and stallions and was eager to help Barr continue Sunny’s line. She also had the backing of Penn’s Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory (PEARL). PEARL, headed by Katrin Hinrichs, Harry Werner Endowed Professor of Equine Medicine and chair of the Department of Clinical Studies at New Bolton Center, was ready to help with whatever cutting-edge laboratory methods were needed to help Sunny and Barr. Sunny was still at the top of her own career, ready to take on more international five-star courses. Her humans did not want to cut that short to breed her or interrupt her progress with an 11-month pregnancy, despite the appeal of creating a Sunny legacy.
PEARL offers various assisted reproduction options. These include vitrification, or freezing, of equine embryos, as well as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a procedure pioneered by Hinrichs. For ICSI, unfertilized eggs, or oocytes, are recovered directly from a mare’s ovaries, matured in the lab and injected with individual sperm from the chosen stallion. Newly created embryos are then grown in the lab until they can either be transferred to a recipient, or surrogate, mare or vitrified and stored for future transfer.
An advanced reproductive technology, ICSI is often used for mares unable to get pregnant due to various reproductive problems or when sperm supply is an issue. Sunny’s issues, however, were bound up in career and time, not reproductive health. She was a good candidate to have foals with the help of standard embryo transfer—breeding Sunny, flushing her embryo, and transferring it to a recipient mare.
That process produced Sunny’s first offspring, now a four-year-old chestnut gelding named Zodak Vindico—known to everyone simply as Vinny. Sunny now has a total of three offspring, all by embryo transfer.
This story is by Rita Giordano. Read more at Penn Vet News.
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