Lisa and Jimmy Gaudio own a farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. It’s the same farm on which Lisa raised Kyrie, her beloved Arabian horse. The pair formed an incredible bond as Lisa transformed the beautiful foal into a national champion. For personal reasons, Lisa and Kyrie were separated for 15 years. Lisa, however, made it her mission to track Kyrie down again — but when she finally brought her back home in 2013, Kyrie was suffering from health conditions that only worsened.
Lisa made the gut-wrenching decision to have ailing Kyrie be put down. But thanks to advances in veterinary medicine, her legacy lived on in the form of a triple miracle that must be seen to be believed. In the minutes following Kyrie’s passing, Lisa and her team transferred her ovaries to the New Bolten reproduction center, where Dr. Tamara Dobbie recovered 16 eggs.
“Those were then packaged and shipped overnight to Texas A&M where they performed in-vitro maturation, the actual ICSI procedure where they inject a single sperm cell into each egg,” Dr. Dobbie told FOX29. Using frozen sperm from a beautiful stallion, four matured embryos were then transferred to three different mares.
All three mares were soon pregnant. In early 2017, three bundles of joy were welcomed into the world. First up was Epona, born to surrogate mom Mercy on January 16. Next was Big Man in Town, born to surrogate mom Peace on January 22. And on February 1, Elle Vitorina arrived in surrogate mom Graceon. “It is unusual to get so many pregnancies from a deceased mare’s ovaries,” Dr. Dobbie says.