Endangered Horse Birth Breakthrough
September 12, 2013—The successful birth of a rare Przewalski's horse through artificial insemination has become an encouraging sign to increase the number of the endangered species. While the artificial insemination process took nearly seven years to complete, biologists see its benefits and hope to improve the technology to develop more successes.
Transcript
Dolores Reed: Supervisory Biologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"She's very precocious. She walks right up to people. She looks for her mom for security to make sure it is okay, but she is very outgoing."
Budhan Pukazenthi, Reproductive Physiologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"The filly we have is the most valuable that you can find on Earth right now. The is the first every that has been successfully produced by artificial insemination."
Dolores Reed: Supervisory Biologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"Peh-VAL-skee or sheh-VAHL-skee. Either pronunciation is considered correct. They're native to Mongolia and China. They went extinct in the wild back in the 1900s and were brought into captivity. They were saved in zoos and the population was built back up again."
Budhan Pukazenthi, Reproductive Physiologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"If you're able to consistently produce offspring by artificial insemination, it is a lot easier for me or another research to travel to an institution that is holding the male, collect semen samples from those animals, transport them to the place where the female is situated and produce an offspring that way. So it give a lot more flexibility in what we can accomplish."
"By developing this tool, what we hope to do is really minimize the need more moving live animals for genetic management purposes. Moving live animals can be risky, it's very expensive."
"The first question that we get asked is why is it so difficult. Why did it take seven years for you to accomplish something that is being done on a daily basis? The actually procedure of doing artificial insemination is exactly the same that we use in domestic horses. But when you throw in the uncertain factors of how these animals respond to our handling, that's a price we pay to wait until we get it nailed to the point where we are able to get successful reproduction."
Dolores Reed: Supervisory Biologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"Because these are not domestic horses, you're not going to see halters on them. I can't lead them around. They have to do it pretty much willingly or on a routine type of pattern. You can't walk up to these guys. You can't touch them. You can't make them do anything that they really don't want to do. It takes them a long time trust you but once you do, I feel really privileged that I get to be a part of their group-their herd."
"She'll stay here at least for the first two years. She may go to another zoo. She most likely will not go to Mongolia because she was captive-bred. We can't really teach her how to defend herself from a wolf or another predator out in the wild. We just don't have that ability here."
Budhan Pukazenthi, Reproductive Physiologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
"If there is no failure, I think there is no fun in Science. And the failures actually allow us to refine some of the techniques and also to understand how we can improve our tools that we are developing to get successes."
