A Horse & Hound Podcast advertisement feature with Zoetis
Welcome to this Horse & Hound Podcast advertisement feature with Zoetis, in which our podcast host Pippa Roome chats to Scottish sports horse breeder Caroline Ironside of MFS Stud Farm and Dr Richard Newton, head of equine infectious disease surveillance at Cambridge Vet School about equine herpes virus.
Equine herpes virus is a huge concerns for breeders as a single positive case on a stud can turn into an “abortion storm” in which multiple mares lose their foals, which is both financially damaging and emotionally traumatic for all involved.
You can listen online here or via your favourite podcast app.
An introduction to Caroline Ironside’s story…
“It goes back to before we actually started losing the foals. Our vets blamed the equine herpes virus outbreak on Storm Arwen, which was on 27 November, 2021, and we were significantly hit. We lost two barns, three roofs on our mare sheds, and because a lot of our pregnant mares were in these barns at the time, we were on quite high level alert, because we thought, with the stress that they had encountered, we were concerned that this may have an impact on their pregnancies.
“Moving forward, the first foal that we lost was on 2 January. It was a showjumping mare, and unfortunately that foal was born dead. Now we did put that foal away for post mortem, because that’s what we do as a stud, we put our foals to post mortem if we do lose anything, just to rule out any kind of infectious diseases. That foal came back as a twisted umbilical cord so we kind of wiped our brow and thought, ‘Well, okay, we’ve lost a foal, but thankfully it’s not herpes virus’, and we kind of moved on.
“The next one that we lost was on 5 March. We had been away at a competition, had come back and found the mare had foaled and the foal was lifeless again. We didn’t put that foal away for post mortem, because we thought, well, the first one was umbilical and because we weren’t at home, we just put this down to really bad luck .
“Then on 23 March, our next foal was born lifeless. This mare had been next door to the one that lost a foal on 5 March. And at that point we knew we had a problem. We sent to foal away for post mortem, and it came back as positive for equine herpes. At that point I have to see we really did panic because we had we had another five mares due after that…”
Stay in touch with all the news in the run-up to and throughout the major shows and events during 2026 and beyond with a Horse & Hound subscription. Subscribe today for all you need to know ahead of these major events, plus online reports on the action as it happens from our expert team of reporters and in-depth analysis in our special commemorative magazines. Have a subscription already? Set up your unlimited website access now
How to watch the Dressage World Championships live from anywhere in the world
How to watch the FEI World Championships live from anywhere in the world
Performance begins long before the start box: preparing horses for peak performance with Harry Meade
Don’t forget this key ingredient in a stress-free show day
Is your horse trying to tell you something?
The three most-common horse insurance questions answered
Get ahead of spring and summer respiratory results
The importance of livery yard insurance – and why it could be money well spent
Inside the yard of a world number one on the new Between The Reins podcast
Horse owners on why equine insurance ‘takes the stress out of everything’
