You Got Any More of Them Cow Pellets?
Hormones are good.
Mimi is a very typical mare. She gets crampy and has backaches when she is in season. She is not a fan of horses being in her personal bubble if she can help it.
I do my best thinking behind the wheel of a car. Something about music playing and having one job to do helps me focus. Just before Mimi’s last ultrasound check, I had an epiphany while on my way home from the barn. Mimi would probably do well on something like Regu-Mate®, or DEPO-PROVERA®, or…cow pellets.
Regu-Mate® is not cheap.
It can cost about $10/day to give to a horse. That puts it way out of reach for your common horse owner.
I have not had much luck giving DEPO-PROVERA® to horses.
I am sure someone somewhere has had luck giving depo to their horse. I just haven’t. So I hesitate to try it again on any more of them. It’s a shot, just like humans get. The timeframe is much closer though. In humans, depo is given every 3 months, with horses, its about every three weeks. (Someone correct me if I am wrong I pulled that from memory.)
Then the epiphany came into play.
Cow pellets. Have you ever heard of them? Not a lot of people have. I f am the type of person who enjoys knowing lengthy words for drugs and still have only managed to call them by the layman's term. When it comes to horses, I believe all the good layman’s terms come from Texas. This just sounds like something a Texan would think up.
For awhile, these were hard to come by, and I was elated when I found out my vet had them on the truck.
The benefits of SYNOVEX® IMPLANTS
- They are wicked cheap. We are talking around $80 total.
- They last for months. The average length of time these puppies hang out in your horse is 6–8 months.
- I have used them on multiple mares. So far I have had 100% success.
How is it done?
After Mimi’s ultrasound, the vet put a twitch on Mimi and cleaned an area between her front legs on the right side. With a sterile gun, the vet implanted an entire sleeve of the pellets subcutaneously (under the skin but not in the muscle).
How does it work?
Each set of pellets releases 1.3–2.0 mg of progesterone daily. Where did I get this number? Check out the link below. With 80 pellets, Mimi will be getting 13.3–20 mg/day on average.
Here is where it gets fuzzy.
CSU did a clinical trial on these implants. CSU says mares need an average of 100mg/day of progesterone to prevent estrus in mares. So why have I had success? Maybe the mares I have used Synovex on only needed a little bit of hormones to take the edge off. Maybe it has been a placebo effect? Maybe the estradiol benzoate, which is also in these pellets, has worked well on my horses in particular.Time will tell with Mimi if it helps her at all. If it doesn’t, we will just have to save the Regu-Mate for the big shows.
We won’t ever be spending $3,650 a year on Regu-Mate. At that rate, the horse would need to literally be worth it’s weight in gold. While I adore Mimi, she has yet to prove herself in the show pen.
