Fiddling with foaling

Abstract

n 1972, John W. Turner and Jay F. Kirkpatrick, friends since their student days at Cornell, decided while on a backpacking trip in Montana that they wanted to develop contraception for wild horses. They agreed that controlling fertility might be the most humane way to handle a rapidly growing population that had been much abused, says Turner, now a reproductive physiologist at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. Before 1971, wild horses on private and public lands were rounded up, shipped to meat-packers, and turned into dog food. industry was unregulated and cruel, says Kirkpatrick, a scientist at Deaconess Research Institute in Billings, Montana. Many horses died enroute to the meat-packers. The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, one of a handful of bills that has passed unanimously in the House and Senate, put an end to such roundups and declared that the animals were to be protected into perpetuity as a symbol of the pioneering spirit of the West. The act, however, did not address ways to control the population-wild herds out west generally experience annual growth rates of 10% to 20%, and they cost millions to manage. In 1972, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials asked Kirkpatrick whether he and Turner could find a way to stop the freeranging, western horses from reproducing. I said 'yes,' says Kirkpatrick. The scientists' aim was an inexpensive, effective contraceptive that could be delivered in one shot