# Pregnancy test on non-humans.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pregnancy-test-on-non-humans/663964
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 19, 2013, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pregnancy-test-on-non-humans/663964 "2013-07-19T18:36:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)
#### Post date: [July 20, 2013, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pregnancy-test-on-non-humans/663964/21 "2013-07-20T18:30:42Z")
> [@Enkel](#):
>
> Here is an actually pee test for mares that is supposed to be pretty accurate: [http://www.foalguard.com/marepregnancytestkit.htm](http://www.foalguard.com/marepregnancytestkit.htm)
>
> I don’t know if it works on humans or not.
>
> For most other livestock, they test blood work for Pregnancy-Specific Protein B (PSPB).
>
> Human pregnancy tests can sometimes come up positive from livestock, but it is a fluke of chemistry and not a reliable way to determine if the animal is pregnant. (In MOST cases, the human test will be negative even for a pregnant animal, because the hormone tested is typically very low or non-existent in livestock.)
Yeah, if you want to know if your livestock is pregnant, I’d used an appropriate test.
My original point in this thread was to reply to the speculation that a test for hCG wouldn’t work in another species because the “h” stood for human. It turns out that in the case of cats and dogs, it wouldn’t work because they don’t have CG. In the case of horses, it may work because they do have CG. There are antibodies that can recognize the same proteins across several species (and I’m using same protein in the sense of an ortholog). I know this because I’ve done cross-species immunoassays against protein targets and not just between mammals.
As a practical matter, the physiology lab used human over-the-counter kits instead of a horse kit because they were cheaper and they wanted to save money. The kit in your link was almost $40 versus less than $10 for a OTC human kit. IICR, students were given unlabeled urine samples from pregnant or non-pregnant mares and they were to use the kits to determine the status of the mare their sample came from. Whatever brand they used was accurate enough to do that in this particular example (a lab that is offered every year, so I imagine they have a large sample size going back for years to determine the accuracy of the kit they use).
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### Author:  [@moriah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moriah)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2013, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pregnancy-test-on-non-humans/663964/22 "2013-07-21T05:05:19Z")
You know if a rabbit’s pregnant because [the human died](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test).
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### Author:  [@Seanette](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seanette)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2013, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pregnancy-test-on-non-humans/663964/23 "2013-07-21T05:51:26Z")
> [@purplehorseshoe](#):
>
> Say what? Sperm + egg. It’s the same basic setup in all vertebrates.
Except that egg-laying isn’t quite the same as mammalian pregnancy. 😃
ETA: should try reading the entire thread. Got ninjaed repeatedly. 🙂
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