Thank you for this very important and informative article on PMU mares. As far as I know there is an alternative to (ab)using mares to produce these hormones. The university of Zurich Switzerland is working on developing an invitro production of pregnant mare serum gonadotropin. Hopefully it will become available soon and end the inhumane suffering for all these mares and foals worldwide.
Oh my God! I've known for years that PMU mares were subject to stress, but I had no idea it was this bad. Those poor mares! And the foals...beyond horrific. Thank you for bringing the details to light. I'm far too old to need Premarin, but it's hard to understand why the Pharmaceutical industry can't provide synthetic hormones.
I don't understand why they have to keep them tied up. It must be possible for them to live as a herd and then train them to pee in a bucket for collection or pee in a certain area using positive reinforcement. Most of my horses pee on command before they go into their stable, so they don't make a mess. Guide dogs can be trained to pee on command. I wonder if there is any research on this. Seems more logical to me. There must be more ethical ways to collect mares urine if they really wanted to.
I almost took Dr. Gunter's post at its word. I've come to trust her on menopause information. My substack is all about hormones and midlife and she's been a great resource, but when I started reading some of the claims and stories about the horses on PMU farms I decided to keep looking into the matter to be 100% sure the stories were fabricated or exaggerated, since Dr. Gunter calls them myths. After listening to a presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwzwgOEyvMg) by Vicki Burns who was the President of the Board of The Canadian Federation of Humane Societies from 2011-2013, I think the PMU farms mistreated many horses in many different ways. In 1994, Vicki was the Executive Director of the Winnipeg Humane Society when she began investigating. The farms were (some still are) mostly in Brandon, Manitoba which is only about 2.5 hours from Winnipeg. Pfizer has more recently put out another drug Duavee and cleverly list it as containing CE (conjugated estrogen), dropping the "equine" effectively removing the reminder that all conjugated estrogen comes from horse urine. I can honestly say that the journey to finding the truth about hormone therapy has been a seriously wild ride full of all sorts of misinformation and so many different sources with different agendas. It's been hard to know who and what to trust. I for one, am glad I got to the bottom of the PMU farm industry truth, although it's heartbreaking. I will be sharing what I've learned. Thanks for your help! I'll embed your post to help spread the word. Hope you don't mind.
Thank you for this very important and informative article on PMU mares. As far as I know there is an alternative to (ab)using mares to produce these hormones. The university of Zurich Switzerland is working on developing an invitro production of pregnant mare serum gonadotropin. Hopefully it will become available soon and end the inhumane suffering for all these mares and foals worldwide.
Holy crap. I have never heard of this practice in South Africa. Beyond awful and so typical.of big pharma.
Oh my God! I've known for years that PMU mares were subject to stress, but I had no idea it was this bad. Those poor mares! And the foals...beyond horrific. Thank you for bringing the details to light. I'm far too old to need Premarin, but it's hard to understand why the Pharmaceutical industry can't provide synthetic hormones.
I don't understand why they have to keep them tied up. It must be possible for them to live as a herd and then train them to pee in a bucket for collection or pee in a certain area using positive reinforcement. Most of my horses pee on command before they go into their stable, so they don't make a mess. Guide dogs can be trained to pee on command. I wonder if there is any research on this. Seems more logical to me. There must be more ethical ways to collect mares urine if they really wanted to.
I almost took Dr. Gunter's post at its word. I've come to trust her on menopause information. My substack is all about hormones and midlife and she's been a great resource, but when I started reading some of the claims and stories about the horses on PMU farms I decided to keep looking into the matter to be 100% sure the stories were fabricated or exaggerated, since Dr. Gunter calls them myths. After listening to a presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwzwgOEyvMg) by Vicki Burns who was the President of the Board of The Canadian Federation of Humane Societies from 2011-2013, I think the PMU farms mistreated many horses in many different ways. In 1994, Vicki was the Executive Director of the Winnipeg Humane Society when she began investigating. The farms were (some still are) mostly in Brandon, Manitoba which is only about 2.5 hours from Winnipeg. Pfizer has more recently put out another drug Duavee and cleverly list it as containing CE (conjugated estrogen), dropping the "equine" effectively removing the reminder that all conjugated estrogen comes from horse urine. I can honestly say that the journey to finding the truth about hormone therapy has been a seriously wild ride full of all sorts of misinformation and so many different sources with different agendas. It's been hard to know who and what to trust. I for one, am glad I got to the bottom of the PMU farm industry truth, although it's heartbreaking. I will be sharing what I've learned. Thanks for your help! I'll embed your post to help spread the word. Hope you don't mind.