Rare Breeds, Frozen in Time

NEWPORT, R.I.

IT didn’t take long for Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat sporting a luxuriant Vandyke beard and an impressive pair of curlicue horns, to live up to his breed’s name. When Peter Borden, accompanied by a stranger, entered the immaculate stable that Chip calls home, the goat pressed his velvety nose through the bars of his stall, begging for a scratch. But at the visitor’s approach, Chip apparently had second thoughts. His left foreleg stiffened, his brown eyes went glassy and he began to list to one side.

“There he goes,” said Mr. Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation, a heritage livestock preservation facility here. The guest turned away, and Chip quickly recovered, his dignity intact.

Located on a 45-acre estate in Newport, SVF is the only organization in the country dedicated to conserving rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation. Chip, now SVF’s unofficial mascot, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early 2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mother’s womb and spent the next several months frozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7, 2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat.

The building adjacent to the one that houses Chip contains three stainless-steel tanks about the size of commercial washing machines. About 45,000 semen and embryo samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle, sheep and goats are preserved there in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 312 degrees — essentially a frozen ark. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transplants them into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.

Frozen in Time – A Fertility Bank for Rare Livestock – NYTimes.com.

Popularity: unranked [?]