In March of 2007 I was persuaded by a friend to adopt a PMU foal from Alberta Canada through the Animali Farm in Santa Maria, California. For those of you who don’t know about the pregnant mare urine industry, this is how hormone replacement therapy used to be manufactured. Premarin was created by keeping mares pregnant year after year, and confining them for several months each year in a stall hooked up to a collection device.
They were released just before foaling out into a pasture with no supervision and no veterinary services to foal in the wild. Luckily these mares were savvy and for the most part the foals survived. Of course if the mares were to be rebred – stallions were let out into the pastures within a month or so of foaling – the foals were weaned, herded off to feed lots and sent to slaughter for the horsemeat industry in Europe and Asia.
Tosca, our first PMU adoption, came from a ranch in Alberta where they had been breeding prize winning Percherons for a long time, and her sire is a registered thoroughbred, so she would never have gone to auction and the kill buyers. She was ten months old and completely wild when she arrived – it was a month before we could touch her. This is her first day in Montana.
