I am so sorry for the loss of your little filly!
I am glad your mare is going to be ok though!
We also had our first loss ever here and the colt was also a "True Breech" as our vet called it.
I have been unable to talk about it until now, so very few people on the LB know about what happened until now.
Anyway, our mare we bought "pasture exposed" back in late Septmeber she is a proven broodmare and still young (6 years old). We are excited to add the bloodlines of close up Boones Little Andy to our mare line up and we were extremely happy when she was indeed in foal. However, we bought the mare for her conformation and bloodlines with color as an added bonus, we did not care if she was in foal or not. So being bred to an outside stallion and we really liked this stallions foals we began to get excited about the upcoming foal and hoped it was as nice as the filly we had born here last year by the same sire.
This mare progressed normally as any of our others, but not having her breeding dates we were going by what our eyes were telling us which was that she was in her last trimester with just the beginning of an udder and looking still rather wide so we assummed she was at least 4 weeks away from delivery since her previous owner said she had gotten a huge bag proir to foaling.
Well on Feb. 17th we had a HUGE Winter snow storm blow through here the previous night and all that day, so needless to say all my horses were inside the barn that and since this mare had very little udder developement we chose to watch the other mare who was bagging up rapdily and our filly that had just been foaled earlier 10 days earlier on the camera. All was well with everyone for AM feeding and the 12:00pm feeding as well as water bucket checks at 3pm that day. Fast forward to the evening feeding and stall cleaning we find the mare struggling to deliver a foal.
The bag had already broken which was already cold and her stall was trashed to the point were we could tell she had been struggling for quite sometime and she also looked wore out .
We knew something was horribly wrong so I went and grabbed the foaling kit from the house and hubby gloved & lubed up and found that there was only a rear end (legs were tucked up under the foal) Hubby has experience in deliveries since he works on a Dairy but with his hands being larger he could not manuver that well inside while we were waiting for our vet to make it here in the blizzard like conditions so we started trying to keep the mare up and moved her to the huge foaling stall and started trying to walk her which seemed to work for the most part. The vet arrived with in 20 minutes of the phone call made to him.
He was able to be the foal out within 10 minutes of his arrival because the mare continued standing and he was able to reach in and deliver the colt rear feet first with relative ease. The colt never took a breath and our vet said he looked full term almost (with a couple of weeks). He was a beautiful Red Dun Pinto Colt. Our vet feels that the mare was aborting because the foal died in utero . His cord did look a little twisted but not bad and he did have a bowel movement in utero as well caused from stress I suppose. So we are treating this birth as a Late term abortion of unkown reasons right now ,so the mare has been/was flushed for a couple of days and put on antibiotics as a precaution. She will be cultured and flushed again this summer before we decide to rebreed her this summer just in case it was infection which our vet does not think it was placentitis (sp) or some type of infectious problem. The colt looked totally normal and the placenta looked very normal too.
Thanks for listening to my story, sorry it is so long.
I hope your mare does not grieve for her baby to much.
Ours did not grieve to much thank goodness.
Jeri
