[QUOTE=Bats79;7910748]
Funnily enough, one of our own mares found in really interesting watching us play with and feed our orphan - she hung at the fence calling to him and while she didn’t have any milk she really did want him to suckle.[/QUOTE]
Goodness, I wonder if she realized what she was getting herself into. He was a very active little guy, kept her going.
It is sad that some people want to believe that the worst case is the norm, even when there is so much evidence that it is not.
[QUOTE=Ticker;7908500]
LaurieB,
My posts were meant to be FYI as you may have noticed that I have not offered much in the way of commentary. I’m not judging or advocating.[/QUOTE]
Aw now - call it like it is. You are rotating poop.
Not sure if this has been mentioned but the home of Northern Dancer (ie. Windfields) used nurse mares at least as recently as 2000, but I have never heard of them skinning and killing the foals. Amistad, Michelle Mueller’s Olympic event horse (London 2012) is actually a nurse mare foal - but i am not aware whether his dam’s services were needed or whether he was raised as any other foal at his dam’s side.
This is an interesting discussion. I have a book that talks about and pictures an orphan foal being draped in the skin of the mare’s “stillborn” foal. The picture is very dated, and the book was first published in 1977 (Encyclopedia of the Horse, published by Crescent Books, 1994 edition. Page 223). Seems like it was a somewhat common practice back then, but it doesn’t say they specifically killed the foal to skin it. It seems to have been something that would happen in the case where the mare’s foal didn’t survive for other reasons. Unless they were sugar-coating the practice for that book, but in that case why mention it at all?
So, unless the nurse mare industry has evolved to the point where they have no qualms about killing foals to use the mare for a more valuable foal (unlikely since medical technology has evolved to the point to make this unnecessary), I find it hard to believe that this is a common practice.
It’s finally happened…
I’m speechless.
OP, when God rained down stupid, he forgot to give you an umbrella.
[QUOTE=whitney159;7909041]
I’ve not worked on a large breeding farm, but have been on them and can tell you that what I’ve seen is a bunch of TB mares with their TB foals at their sides, no nurse mares in sight.
BUT, as for the skinning thing…once source people might be recalling would be an old copy of “The Encyclopedia of the Horse”. I grew up a horse crazy girl and had this book and distinctly remember a series of pictures of a baby who had lost his mom being introduced to a mare that had lost her foal and it had the dead foal’s skin tied to it and a description of how this helps the mare accept the other foal. BUT this what where the two had both suffered a loss and were put together. I can see someone taking that and turning it into “it’s common practice”.[/QUOTE]
I didn’t see your post until after I had written mine. That’s exactly the book I was referencing. It was just one picture, though. I don’t know if it was actually common practice or not, but it seemed to be accepted by the author as pretty matter-of-fact that it happened. But there definitely was no reference to actually killing the nurse mare’s foal, only that the foal was stillborn.
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