Air delivery: super semen delivered by plane to beat bank holiday traffic

When it’s a bank holiday and your mare needs inseminating that day and the semen is hours away, what do you do? Deliver it by air, of course.

The Bullimores wanted to breed a full sibling to their seven-year-old out of Sarah’s five-star mare Lilly Corinne and by Amiro Z, and as determined by scanning, the mare was ready to be inseminated last weekend. So a friend of the Bullimores stepped – or flew – in with his plane.

“It was much more exciting than the normal checking of the UPS tracking system!” Lorna Wilson of Elite Stallions told H&H.

“They decided it would be faster, with bank holiday weekend traffic, to fly down. There’s a little airfield two miles away so it was perfect.”

Lorna said she normally sends semen via next-day Royal Mail delivery. There is a same-day service but with the distance between Elite Stallions and the Bullimores, and the traffic, it would have been a lengthy and expensive option.

“So they flew down, and they went over Badminton on the way and got a look at the course,” Lorna said. “Sarah’s not riding there this year, but Brett’s walked, or flown, the course!

“I was slightly disappointed because I’d suggested they wear suits and sunglasses, but it was all good, and we could track them home on flight radar.”

The vet from Rossdales was at the Bullimores’ ready to inseminate when the semen arrived.

“So we’ll know in a couple of weeks’ time,” Lorna said. “It was all good.”

And of course not many potential event horses have been over the Badminton course before conception…

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