A foal survives dystocia and the death of his dam and joins his owners' collection of pets

by Brent Kelley, D.V.M.

THE MARE lay there. Uterine contractions had long since ceased, but the little foal--though "little" is hardly the word--still had his hindquarters in his dam.

This farm, in the Virginia countryside about 30 or 40 miles from Washington, D.C., bred miniature horses. Or, rather, the miniature horses bred themselves. Each tiny stallion had his own harem in his own field. Each would spend the summer with his ladies and then be removed from them in the early fall.

The little mares were then on their own. The ones that were pregnant eventually foaled. They were left to do this in their own fields and not taken to the barn until the day after their foals arrived. Foaling was au naturel, and Mother Nature handled it pretty well, as a rule.

This mare, though, evidently had started the birthing process sometime overnight and had been unable to complete it. I was the farm's veterinarian, and the owner called me about 8 a.m. and reported the problem. "The foal's half out, the mare's not straining, and I can't pull it," he told me.

"Is the foal alive?" I asked.

"You bet," he replied. "He's waving those little front feet frantically."

I went there immediately. The little guy was bone dry and obviously not too pleased with his situation. He whinnied and thrashed, but still his rear stayed firmly within Mom.

The mare, in the meantime, was alive but worn out. She made minimal response to her baby's calls and efforts. I attempted to insert my hand around the foal and into the vagina, but there was no room and there was no natural lubricant. From all appearances, this birth had been going on for a long time.

I grabbed some lubricant from my trunk and applied it generously around the vulva and on my hands, but still I could not get a hand in. I tried to push the foal back into the mare a little, hoping to carry a little lubricant in that way, but he would not budge. And he thought little of the maneuver.

It was apparent that we had the quintessential hip lock. These are not rare, but neither are they common; if detected early, a little rotation and/or manipulation alleviates the problem. But this one was not detected early.

One undesirable consequence of a hip lock that goes on for a while is often a dead foal. If the foal does not get far enough out for his lungs to be able to expand, he cannot breathe. The umbilicus frequently breaks, and all in all, you have a sorry situation.

But this little guy had his chest well out, beyond the ribs, so breathing was possible. In fact, the more I fooled with him, the harder he worked at it. After a few minutes, he was almost panting.

We were getting nowhere, though, and I was at a loss as to what to do next. But then the little mare made the decision easy.

Surgical delivery

She died.

Immediately I grabbed my metal deworming cup from the car and expressed into it about six ounces of colostrum from the mare's bag and set it aside.

At this point in my veterinary career, I worked in a general large-animal practice. I had been unable to find employment in an exclusively equine practice, so I took the closest thing I could find. But I still had to do about 30% cattle and pigs. As I am on record as saying, pigs are okay, but cattle are only good when properly cooked. The cattle were proving important at that moment, however, because of some of the equipment I had to carry with me.

If a cow died on some remote farm, it was often necessary to determine the cause. It was impractical or, in many cases, impossible to transport her to a proper facility (laboratory or university), so field postmortems often had to be performed. For this purpose, my employer supplied me with a large, very sharp knife and a wicked-looking instrument that strongly resembled pruning shears but were, in reality, bone cutters.

I got out these tools and rolled the mare up on her back, a maneuver singularly unappreciated by the foal. The owner helped steady the dead mare, and I used the knife to open her at the junction of her left hind leg and abdomen. I sliced down to the pelvis, then took the bone cutters and severed the pelvic girdle through the ischium and pubis. (This is more easily written than accomplished.)

I thought this would allow enough extra movement to extricate the little guy, but still I could not budge him. I was beginning to think I'd picked up super glue instead of lubricant.

He was getting frantic now. I guess he had decided that the time was well past when he should have been fully delivered; his owner was being severely battered by tiny front feet flying in all directions.

I took the knife and sliced open the area opposite the first incision and cut through the right pelvic bones as I had done with the left. Finally, as we pulled both of the mare's legs to the sides, we had a little space. With the owner straddling the corpse, holding the severed bones apart, I gave a prodigious tug on the colt, and out he came!

He lay there for a moment or two, perfectly still and just blinking. His right side was up, and on the point of the hip was a lesion about three inches in diameter and completely through the skin.

Then he began flopping and succeeded in flipping himself over. An identical lesion was on the left hip point. He had been pushed so hard by his mother that the contact points between his hips and her pelvis had literally shredded his hide.

First meal

But he was totally in the world now, and his needs had to be met, which meant he had to receive his colostrum. Normally I would pass a nasogastric tube in a neonate that was unable to nurse (for whatever reason), but the average neonate foal that I encountered weighed in the range of 100 pounds and had nostrils sufficiently large to accept a tube. This fellow, however, probably weighed 15 pounds, and there was no way I would be able to pass even my smallest tube through his tiny nostrils.

Allowing him to attempt to nurse was obviously the easiest choice. I had a lamb's nipple in the car, and my addiction to soft drinks meant that I always had a pop bottle. (Due to the fact that I mucked out my vehicles only semi-annually, I usually had around 30 pop bottles, actually.)

I poured the colostrum into a bottle, placed the nipple over the end, and expressed a little into the colt's mouth. This was apparently what he had been waiting for his entire life; he glommed onto the nipple and eagerly sucked the colostrum down.

We medicated his hips and tried to help him up. The front end was willing, but the hindquarters were reluctant. We gave him a break, and I turned again to his lifeless dam to see what trauma may have been done to her in the dystocia.

The uterine wall had two large tears. This foal was not going to be born naturally, at least not out of this mare. There was just no space. Mother Nature would have culled them, but our intervention ended up halving the culling process.

Unusual nursery

The owner's wife had an upholstery shop on the farm. He said that was where the foal needed to be so the youngster could have the frequent attention he needed. The owner picked up the foal, and we put him in my car and drove to the shop.

His wife always seemed to be smiling, even when she was not. She was always surrounded by animals; the doors to the shop were always open in all kinds of weather, and animals of all description came and went at will.

There were at least a dozen dogs, from a very small Jack Russell terrier to a very large you-name-it, and probably eight or nine cats. A very large sheep was usually there, as was a totally obnoxious goat. The pond in front of the shop sported dozens of ducks of various breeds, and they, too, frequented the inner recesses of the shop at will.

So when we delivered the little newcomer, the owner's wife was glad to see him. She placed some soft upholstering materials in a corner, and her husband placed the colt on them.

Immediately six or seven dogs began investigating the interloper. One, an aged Labrador retriever who had had many litters, took especial interest; she began licking and nuzzling him, and in a minute was lying down beside him.

We retired to an old, partially re-covered couch, and I instructed the owners on getting some mare's milk replacer and a squeeze enema, and we talked over how to work with him to get him to stand.

After a short while, I got up to leave, but before I went, we walked around the corner to check on the foal again. Two-thirds of my directions ended up being useless; he was standing, still being licked by the Lab, and an enema was no longer necessary.

More dog than horse

The owner got the milk replacer, and the little guy continued to take the bottle readily and frequently. We tended to the lesions on his hips and they healed quickly, but the hair came in white. His natural color was a grayish brown, and two baseball-sized white spots really stood out. Inevitably, he was named Spot.

Spot grew well as the foster child of the old Lab. He came and went with the dogs and other critters and, amazingly, seemed to become housebroken.

He ran with the dogs and played doggy games, although a little roughly for the smaller canines. By four months, he was off the bottle and onto dog food. I did not think this was a good idea and convinced the owners to mix a little horse feed in with the dry dog food to try to get him onto a more suitable diet.

He had grown to the size of a middle-sized dog, maybe an Australian Shepherd. It was getting to the point where he should be with his own kind, I thought, so one day we took him to the field where he had been foaled. There were six or eight other mini-foals there, and it was natural, I thought, for him to want to be with them. But it never occurred to me that he had never looked into a mirror. He did not know that he looked like them.

We turned him in with the other little horses, and he indicated, loudly and for all to hear, that this was not the course he wished to take with his life. I left, listening to him bellow, and did not return for several days.

On my next visit to the farm, the dogs, as usual, came bounding and barking to greet me. And with them was Spot.

"He just doesn't think he's a horse," the owner's wife explained. "He was so unhappy."

I went off with the owner to attend to things, and as I was finishing, his wife was motoring out the drive in her van. She waved as she passed us, and in the back a half-dozen various and sundry dogs bounced around. And right in the middle, watching us out of the rear window, was Spot!

I looked at the owner.

"He loves to go to town," he explained.