Yeah, I basically stand there and give him scratches until she finishes her grain. 
He looks great I just worry about his soft stool.
It is also very hot here, 106 today but he seems to be handling the heat well.
This is a first for me having a foal that doesn’t love mommas milk!!!
My colt - a month old - is also an early eater. Been eating hay and grass since about a week old, and interest in momma’s grain (ration balancer) since 2 weeks or so. However, he does nurse, but not nearly as much now as before. He also has been drinking water pretty much from the get go.
This is my first foal, so I am glad to hear that the OP’s baby is doing well despite the non-traditional eating/nursing habits!
[QUOTE=gumtree;7595663]
I suppose that’s what the “book” says but IME with lots and lots of foals we have never had a problem with a foal nibbling on some of her momma’s vittles. We set the feed buckets up as high as possible but still in a “proper” position for a horse to eat out of and not worry about anything.
Other then that and short of having somebody stand there with a shank on the foal I am not sure how you would go about keeping a foal’s head out of the bucket.
To each their own on this.[/QUOTE]
that at is all I am suggesting - raise the bucket so that the foal cannot share as easily. That is really all you can do.
I understand the concern, and agree check him out and keep a close eye.
Let me tell you that I adopted a 3 week old orphan that had already begun eating grass, hay, and moms grain, as well as drinking water. I TRIED EVERYTHING get her to drink all sorts of milk replacers to no avail. She would eat sweet feed so I got her that and managed, with much difficulty, to get her to eat milk replacer pellets if mixed with sweet feed. Long story short, she never had any issues.
We have normal poop! Yay!
Even with the heat today he was nursing and looked great.
Not sure what those 3 days of no nursing was. Hope it doesn’t happen again!!!
[QUOTE=Home Again Farm;7595646]
Foals this age cannot digest cereal grains, so it is best to keep the foal from eating mom’s feed. Sharing her hay is not a problem. Very good that the foal is nursing. :yes:[/QUOTE]
Actually it should be the cellulose in the hay that would be harder for the foal to digest without proper gut flora. Grains should be easier for a foal to digest and I think they recommend foal ration before hay for that reason. Creep feeders are recommended prior to 2 months old.
Pablum is made of grains and used to recommended as a baby’s first food.
Wonderful news!
Foals don’t have the enzymes to digest grain until they are at least 3 months old. They can handle milk replacement pellets. All of our mares have grain bins set high on the walls so the foals can’t reach them. We never feed alfalfa and especially not to foals. It is high in calcium and can cause diarrhea, gas and warmblood foals don’t need all that calcium.
If you keep milking the mare by hand - she will continue to bag up. Biosponge is a great product but make sure you use it for the proper length of time. As others have suggested make sure you get a blood screening done - so you at least have a base of information - should the foal have any additional problems.
[QUOTE=ise@ssl;7598722]
Foals don’t have the enzymes to digest grain until they are at least 3 months old. They can handle milk replacement pellets. All of our mares have grain bins set high on the walls so the foals can’t reach them. We never feed alfalfa and especially not to foals. It is high in calcium and can cause diarrhea, gas and warmblood foals don’t need all that calcium.
If you keep milking the mare by hand - she will continue to bag up. Biosponge is a great product but make sure you use it for the proper length of time. As others have suggested make sure you get a blood screening done - so you at least have a base of information - should the foal have any additional problems.[/QUOTE]
I’m not trying to be adversarial, honestly. But could someone show me any paper or creditable source that says this?
Many foal/mare foods are feed in creeps that are made available right away. And biologically, there is no reason that a foal should not be able to digest small amounts right away and by 2.5 months old…be eating it regularly.
A horse has special bacterial to ferment cellulose and until that develops, is not able to digest some plant material but a grain is different. Literally, grains are fed to human babies as their first food as it is easily digestible. Horses and people are different, but there should be absolutely no issues with a 2.5 month old eating a mare/foal pellet. I think people are confusing cellulose digestion with grain.
http://www.thehorse.com/articles/26872/feeding-foals
http://www.deerpathequine.com/pdf/Deerpath_Foal_Nutrition.pdf
A drop of 23% in fat within
mare’s milk was reported throughout this same time period. Schryver et al, 1986 reported that normal mares meet foals’ needs for about two months. This is when a grain supplement, milk based for optimal digestion is best, must be offered. They do not need hay at this point. Nursing foals need milk and grain, hay may be introduced for them to sniff, play with and munch on, but it will not be a significant source of energy. Their gut is not fully developed enough to break down the hay and turn it into energy, leave that for
the mare.
One little thought.
Check the ingredients list of your kibble - does it have garlic in it???
Or a lot of rosemary or other “herbs” flavorings?
Garlic very readily gets into the milk and it changes the taste quite profoundly.
Even human mothers are warned not to eat garlic while they are nursing because it can cause (1) upset tummy and, (2) put a baby off nursing.
Horses are similar and young foals are very sensitive to flavors.
If the kibble has garlic (or rosemary or whatever), find a new kibble without it.
Nope she gets triple crown growth.
Same thing happened to my colts last year, he was getting into too much of mare’s grain. We’d give him a tiny snack and feed the mare in a bucket that wasn’t as easy for him to reach. Good luck!
Sounds to me like the alfalfa upset his system and when it was discontinued, biosponge and whatever else was done to regularize his system, he began to nurse again. Sounds good to me. Also, I had always been told that foals should not be expected to utilize hay for nutrition but could certainly eat grain, this was before the ration balancers and this is what we did on the TB breeding farm I worked on, foals got grain usually with the mare, and were out on pasture, sometimes day and night unless really hot.
Foal digestive enzymes:
Modern “creep feeds” are milk based not cereal or forage based to better match the foal’s digestive abilities at that age.
A lot of development including changes in gut flora and in digestive enzymes occurs in a foal’s digestive system as it matures:
http://www.ker.com/library/proceedings/08/1_GastroTract_p7.pdf
The new issue of The Horse just came out, and has a really nice article on young horse development. It talks about not just the fact that foals can’t digest (which is not the same as can’t eat) forages and grains, but why. Their intestines develop at a very rapid rate early on - they simply don’t have what it takes in the first few months. Literally. As the length of the intestines develops, so does the colony of bacteria necessary to digest these things.
[QUOTE=Dawn J-L;7602803]
Foal digestive enzymes:
Modern “creep feeds” are milk based not cereal or forage based to better match the foal’s digestive abilities at that age.
A lot of development including changes in gut flora and in digestive enzymes occurs in a foal’s digestive system as it matures:
http://www.ker.com/library/proceedings/08/1_GastroTract_p7.pdf[/QUOTE]
This is interesting and says that the majority of the nutrition should come from milk in the first 2 months but it does not quantify the results or say that it is not possible for foals to digest grains right away as the enzymes are present, just not in the levels as those to process milk, which makes sense.
In fact it says by 3.5 months the foal is more suited to grains than milk as the tolerance for lactose drops significantly.
I am not advocating feeding foals only grains or even huge quantities but the Horse also has tons of articles that suggest creep feeding them from the start to get them used to the food as it greatly reduces food related stress of weaning.
And most of the foal pellets I am speaking of are good through the first year,(as in the big company products). Usually they do not have milk in them but I think a milk product is a great way to go to introduce pellets in the first month then gradually add more foal/yearling product.
[QUOTE=JB;7602820]
The new issue of The Horse just came out, and has a really nice article on young horse development. It talks about not just the fact that foals can’t digest (which is not the same as can’t eat) forages and grains, but why. Their intestines develop at a very rapid rate early on - they simply don’t have what it takes in the first few months. Literally. As the length of the intestines develops, so does the colony of bacteria necessary to digest these things.[/QUOTE]
The pdf link I included above detailed all those developmental factors. 
Here is it again: http://www.ker.com/library/proceedings/08/1_GastroTract_p7.pdf
[QUOTE=JB;7602820]
The new issue of The Horse just came out, and has a really nice article on young horse development. It talks about not just the fact that foals can’t digest (which is not the same as can’t eat) forages and grains, but why. Their intestines develop at a very rapid rate early on - they simply don’t have what it takes in the first few months. Literally. As the length of the intestines develops, so does the colony of bacteria necessary to digest these things.[/QUOTE]
If that is the article posted by Dawn it says that foals digestive track changes with age to accommodate cellulose and complex carbohydrates. It doesn’t say that simple carbohydrates (grains) are not digestible.
Foals increase forage intake dramatically during this time, suggesting that a functional hindgut is important
during the dietary transition from milk and the soluble carbohydrates in grain to the structural carbohydrates of forage at weaning.
Page 5
I believe people are confusing the vernacular of complex carbs with the terms used here. Starches and most of the carbs in grains are not “complex” aka insoluble. It is the cellulose (which vertebrates have no enzymes for and need bacterial help) that is digested in the hind gut that requires a change in the digestive system to process.
Cellulose is “fiber” for us and relatively indigestible because our digestive systems, like a foals, does not that the bacterial yet to break it down.
Foals do have amylase at birth and it surpasses lactose enzymes at 3.5 months according to the results. So between the age of 1 to 2 months the foals body increases it’s ability to digest cereals in response to it’s changing diet. And by 3.5 months grains exceed milk according to the foals digestion.
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