Hah.
Hah. Yeah, I did. I bought a 2.5 year old PRE filly from a reputable breeder this past March. The horse did not appear pregnant, and I wasn’t suspicious because one assumes a reputable breeder is not an idiot. The filly had a bit of a potbelly when the weather began warming up but again, didn’t think anything of it. Fresh grass, plus youngsters can look a bit funky. Fast forward to start of June – I went to the yard, and there was something about the shape of her belly that made me think, “Oh… shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.” I checked her udder, and it was swollen. I posted a thread on the Horse and Hound forum (the UK equivalent of this), titled, “Should I hit the panic button?” A couple posters suggested that it might be a reaction to clover in the field. I prayed for clover.
Vet came out two days later. Took one look at the horse and said, “Not only is this horse in foal, but I will eat my hat if she doesn’t foal this week.” I burst into tears. I had put my 28-year old horse down two days beforehand, and I did not want a foal. And I was at a livery yard, which understandably did not have the perfect set-up for foals. But at that point, the foal was coming no matter what. Yard owner and I just had to make it work with what we had. The vet, at any rate, did not think her age greatly increased the risk of complications. And about two weeks shy of her third birthday, my filly popped out a healthy colt.
It wasn’t all fun and cute foalie games, though. The Andalusian breeder would pet and fuss over her youngstock, but she didn’t halter break them or anything like that. Maybe due to her age and the fact that she’d only been halter broken since I’d bought her in March, the filly became very foal proud and totally lost her mind. She was feral and uncatchable, for like a month. None of the usual tricks worked, so we had to set up a mustang race in the field and herd them into it in order to get halters back on. I was panicking about the mare panicking and hurting herself and the foal, but the YO knew how to use a race, and my filly actually had a good brain underneath new-mom-postpartum weirdness. Once everyone was contained, normal service could resume. The mare remembered that 5000 years of domestication had really happened.
I think with a mature, established horse, or a youngster who was actually handled and halter-broke as a foal, the mustang race would not have been needed.
The colt is five months old now. Both of them are now very civilized horses. He’s cute, but I’m still selling him as soon as he’s weaned. His mom is young and obviously unbroke, and I need two babies like a hole in the head.
As for how we got into this situation in the first place? The breeder, for reasons known only to herself, had stopped separating her colts and her fillies (and she doesn’t geld her colts – that’s apparently a PRE thing), so all the youngstock were running together, like teenagers in Ibiza. What do you think is going to happen? The sire is my filly’s half-brother of the same age. Linebreeding, right?