Have the local vet out. A rectal palpation costs about $25 or an ultrasound around $45 + the call fee. Well worth the money.
[QUOTE=Kyzteke;5783344]
So I doubt the mare is going to foal today or next week if all is well. I’m betting you have another 10-30 days if she IS in foal.[/QUOTE]
Phew! I’m hoping that she’s just now bagging up… she’s certainly not leaking. I SHOULD have noticed all this sooner. I’ve been feeding my kids every darn day, and I just should have noticed. I’m hoping that she’s just now bagging up to give me that additional 10-30 days and that she hasn’t BEEN bagged up for several days with me just now noticing… I’m going to get more photos today and see about moving our vet appointment when I can get somebody on the phone today.
Her vaccs were given on 7/10 without me knowing that she was prego… with only a month and a week gone by, which vaccs would be most important to boost her with? I did her other ones at home and her rabies+coggins through the vet, but whatever vaccs I need to do I can go ahead and get them today or have the vet do them Thurs/Fri whenever our appt gets moved to.
Thanks! That is helpful.
I handled him a few times when I was boarding there. I always thought he had a somewhat awkward looking dish to his face. Not something I expected out of a Friesian cross. If you search the stallion’s name, you can find where they’ve listed him with a $1k stud fee on several different websites. That’s how I managed to track them down last night.
I hope the foal isn’t too heavy… my mare is so dainty usually. 15.3 hh, usually right around 1020 lbs when I tape her when she’s in shape. USUALLY she looks pretty elegant (at least in person) compared to most TWH you meet. It’s certainly not a cross I would have picked…
Haha, no telling what color it’ll be… I know for sure that she’s not homozygous for spots. Looking at the stallion’s get currently listed on their site, he doesn’t look homozygous either (which is funny, because a year ago she was trying to advertise him as homozygous with a 100% guarantee for spots without having had him DNA typed to know, and obviously the filly on her site is not spotted).
Yeah, that’s the route I’ll try to go then. I’ve got a year to get it rehomed because my fiance might be moving us across states in a year when he finishes his masters and starts his PhD. We’re in AL right now while he finishes the one, but he’s talking about NC, OH, TX, among others and I certainly don’t want to be hauling too many ponies around much less boarding if I can’t find myself a new farm.
I could see her going the route of giving me crap… we ended on pretty indignant, bad terms. She actually still has a small box of my belongings that she wouldn’t relinquish when I was moving my horses, and actually encouraged her small children to taunt me as I was loading up (kids I had previously watched for her, who has always known me as being very nice to them).
She’ll probably want to make some claim to the foal if she finds out. One of my uncles is a lawyer so I’m going to call him today just to ask questions if possible now that I’m calmer, but he’s not local so if I really decide to pursue a lawsuit locally I’ll need to find someone that knows the ropes in this area.
No kidding, right??? And this was after I had TOLD her that my mare had become a real hooker hoebag after she turned a certain age. When I was still in college farther north in the state, I kept her at a place where they had a 5/6 yr old gelding who had only just been cut before he got there. Within the first week, he had mounted or attempted to mount every mare in the boarder pasture except for Classy (or so I was told). She kept trying to be part of his mini herd/harem within the herd, and kept getting driven away, but then kept putting her hiney in his face till he finally gave in and mounted her, too. I had told old BM this story and warned her that she always needed to be pastured well away from her stud. That worked for the first few months until she redid her fenceline, and what idiot puts her breedable boarded horses right next to the stud with nothing but 4 pieces of hot tape that have had a history of getting grounded out?
Yeah, she’ll probably first deny it, then demand the colt, then deny it… Old BM can do NO wrong, which is where we inevitably butted heads and why I moved my two kids since she refused to feed my boy more to keep him from losing (sorry, but crap feed for low maintenance horses isn’t going to cut it when you’re only giving 2 qts of Stock and Stable to a young OTTB in a training program, but that’s a whole other story). I figure she’ll deny that her horse is the sire, which would then require proving parentage other than just coincidental dates I’m sure if the courts get involved, which I’m betting would then require DNA testing if the courts handle it in a similar way to human courts when a parent is asking for child support.
Yikes! I had thought to get her ultrasounded instead of palpated to see if they could estimate timeline and approx. due date… wasn’t sure how advanced their estimation stuff would be compared to human ultrasounds. 2 weeks? makes a nervous squeaky sound
Are there any other combo wormers that are safe on pregnant mares? I never had to look at that kind of info on the box before. The last time the vet had been here to do her coggins + rabies, she had told me not to use just ivermectin in our area because she was seeing an increasing number of ivermectin resistant parasite cases around here locally. That’s why I started my kids on Quest Plus, rotating with Safeguard and Pyrantel Palmoate, plus only doing them every 4-6 months instead of every 2 to try to prevent more wormer resistant bugs.
As to feed, she’s been on only a ration balancer and grass, but I plan to stock up on some kind of mare and foal type of feed asap for once the baby is on the ground, but in the meantime, is adding alf/beep mash plus giving her some of my other kid’s Purina Ultium (slowly introduced of course) along with some hay the right direction to go in leading up to delivery?
[QUOTE=camohn;5783412]I had an oops Pintoloosa foal this spring…my Paint stallion jumped his gate and then proceeded to jump the hubbys Appy polo mare last spring.
http://s82.photobucket.com/albums/j276/camohn03/?action=view¤t=1ab388eb.jpg[/QUOTE]
That’s a cute baby! I hope whatever she pops out is cute… It’ll be just my luck if this unexpected little one comes out strange looking… oh well, at least both mama and daddy are relatively sweet (at least my mare is super sweet), so maybe baby will at least get mama’s temperament.
I feel like the parent whose 13 year old got pregnant in after school care… except my girl is actually 9. Jeez, if it’s this bad when they get in trouble like this, it makes me second guess having real kids! Ha, horses are cheaper 
Then again, I want a future daughter or son to follow in my footsteps when I get them their first pony… Hehe, too many future chickens to count! I need to stick to the current issue.
Do not worm her now. If the palpation shows she’s pregnant (She should be around 306 days using 10/15/10 as a ballpark), then wait to worm her the day she foals with Ivermectin to protect the foal for threadworms.
She could go another month before she foals (and you WANT her to wait another two weeks at least). If she is in foal, start ramping up her feed now. She’s likely going to require more feed and forage than you can possibly believe once she’s lactating. If you are behind the curve now on the body scale then it’s nearly impossible to catch up once she starts nursing…AND…you don’t want to start throwing all that feed at her at once.
Again - at 300 and some days, as was mentioned earlier, palpation is all that will be required to find the foal. No ultrasound needed. Save your money - you may need it.
If you vaccinated for rabies, EWT and WN in July you should be fine. I don’t know if you’ve had a problem down there this year with Venezeulan. Talk to the vet about that.
And no, ultrasound will not be able to determine gestation length. Sorry!
What ahf said…
PLUS - sit down, take a deep breath, and get prepared for a FUN time if she is indeed pregnant (which, I agree with others - she looks it to me). When it comes to facilities - I foaled two mares out at my own little farm (before moving to a bigger nicer one); both were in a small paddock with a shelter since I had no stalls. For the first mare, I had 3 strands of electric tape fencing and it worked fine, though I ended up removing the lower strand the night she was born because baby stumbled a couple of times and went through the fence, I put it back up when she was steadier on her feet the next day. While it was satisfactory, that’s all the marks I’d give it for foal fencing. By the second mare, I’d upgraded the paddock fencing to 4-board. You don’t have to have a stall for foaling, though it certainly makes it easier to watch the mare and be there for the foaling. Kathy St. Martin (EquineReproduction here) has a photo essay of a mare foaling in a field - you should visit her site because she’s got some great articles. http://www.equine-reproduction.com/index.shtml
Here’s the pictorial on foaling: http://www.equine-reproduction.com/articles/Foaling.shtml
Good luck!
Relax. Babies are fun! And hey, you’ve missed out on the last 9 months of stressing, so you pretty much get to jump in where the fun stuff starts. Don’t feel bad about missing her getting fat and bagging up. When you see them every day, it’s hard to notice little changes and it’s not like you were expecting to see signs of pregnancy. Just relax and enjoy the fun and sleepless nights ;).
Registering a TWH/Friesian/Appy cross is pointless, really: what’s the value add for going that route, expending that effort? To my mind, there’s no reason to deal with the stallion owner, worry about ownership, her claiming him, etc…anything. It is what it is…an unwanted foal c/o an irresponsible stallion owners- though you gotta admit that you own some slice of the responsibility if you knew there was one fence line between the horses, and you too assumed it would work.
Did I see you’re considering yet another lawsuit? That may just eat up time and energy and yield very little in the end. Why kick that hornet’s nest? Onward and upward, girlie. Life’s too short to sue everyone- this isn’t the first time you’ve thrown the idea of a lawsuit around in the short time I’ve known you- that sort of thing becomes a reputation that preceeds you: just something to think about. Don’t you have enough on your plate with the foal and a farm to keep up with?
We’ll see what Friday brings, I guess. I hope she’s just fat. The last thing you need is another horse, with the future move and all that…
She doesn’t look any different from how my mare did when we thought she was pregnant (she was just fat and out of shape), even her udder had swollen because of the weight gain. But it’s also very believable that the SO is lieing through her teeth to you.
I would think if she’s due in less then a month you should be able to see/feel some movement on her sides if the foal shifts.
It does look suspicious to me, and how our mares’ udders look at about 310-315 days. Especially since a maiden mare usually has absolutely nothing, whereas a multiparus mare may always have something larger. So mid-September would be about right and if she was bred in October that all matches up. Interested to hear the outcome and good luck!! 
As long as she is getting an appropriate amount of ration balancer and her diet is good, I would not change her diet. Best of luck to you.
She certainly looks like she’s bagging up! Good luck, your mare looks like a doll.
I am not sure if this will help you or not, but have you listened for a hearbeat with a stethoscope? I don’t know if this works for all mares or not. But when my mare was pregnant last year around nine months I had a minor heart attack when I came home and thought she had lost the foal, my coach came over and found the foal’s heartbeat.
I swear everyday after that I was out there checking for a heartbeat and never really had problems finding it. It was quicker then the mare’s (who had been in training for a T3D, so I knew her resting heartrate very well).
Like I said, not sure if it always works or not just thought I would throw it out there as an idea.
[QUOTE=katarine;5783644]
Registering a TWH/Friesian/Appy cross is pointless, really: what’s the value add for going that route, expending that effort? To my mind, there’s no reason to deal with the stallion owner, worry about ownership, her claiming him, etc…anything. [/QUOTE]
Well if we get lucky and it’s not gaited, it was pointed out to me that most offspring that have anything Friesian in it (at least, locally) turn out pretty nice. If I don’t keep it (and right now, keeping it is not in the plan), then I want it to have the best chance of having a good home where the owners will be be of the caliber to have the knowhow or seek out the knowledge to take care of it well. Frankly, some of us equine enthusiasts can be snobs about horse ownership and won’t consider anything without papers of some kind. For some, it doesn’t matter WHAT the papers are, but they see “registered” and they automatically attach more value to it. I’m less concerned about the time and effort as I am about giving it the best chance of getting a good home if I don’t keep it. While part of me wants to be sentimental and keep my girl’s first baby, the practical side realizes this really might not be a possibility. I’ve THOUGHT about breeding her to something non-gaited with thoughts of getting something with her temperament and hopefully daddy’s movement, but that’s a crapshoot and is part of why I’ve never chanced it to now.
Truthfully, I did know she was redoing fences, but she made it sound like all the fence lines were staying the same, just getting upgraded. Then I didn’t make it out for a few days because of work keeping me till after dark (didn’t think anything of it since I was boarding, that’s why I was paying someone to take care of her) and when I showed up a few days later, she was pissed, and my mare was in the dinky paddock getting picked on by the boss mare. Originally, she had just intended to take the existing fencelines and upgrade them all to a taller fence with electrobraid instead of hot tape, but I think the cost just got too high, hence why they made just the one additional broodmare paddock and the middle two into one big one. I was there for the first day of fence changing when they made the dinky mare paddock, but by the next time I came out, they had taken out the middle fence lines to make one big one in the middle, and she’d already gotten moved and I got chewed out. When I really think back, I can’t actually remember ever seeing her in the paddock next to him, but I certainly got an earful that she was acting like a hooker and teasing him, which was the explanation when I asked why she was in with the broodmares getting beat up. When I asked why they had taken out the middle fence and if they were going to put it back up again, they asked me if I wanted to pay for it, so I took the hint that they were cutting back on the fence expenses.
This kind of situation is EXACTLY why stallion insurance exists, though (well, in addition to unmannerly stallions injuring people sometimes). In my opinion with regards to past incidences, theft of property and assault are reasonable grounds for suing someone, but in the end I filed charges and let the D.A. handle that. Considering suing and then moving on and letting go may not be too far off from actually suing since the idea did at least occur each time, but again, this is exactly the kind of situation that creates the need for stallion insurance because that’s the kind of thing that covers your ass when you’re irresponsible with your stallion. Talking about a legitimate lawsuit and considering it given that everything I’ve read so far about foaling expenses indicates they could get high are still not the same as randomly engaging in frivolous lawsuits. This mare is like my kid, being that I don’t have human children yet, and everyone has seen plenty of lawsuits for a lot less when it comes to parents protecting their kids’ interests.
[QUOTE=grayarabpony;5784090]
She certainly looks like she’s bagging up! Good luck, your mare looks like a doll.[/QUOTE]
Thanks! She’s a sweet girl I pulled her out before breakfast, groomed her, and took more pictures today that I still need to upload. She’s being all lovey dovey and loving the attention, panicky and concerned though the attention may be. Haha, she’s getting lots of cookies and instantly has more breakfast in her bucket, so she’s a happy camper.
WE’VE GOT BABY BELLY KICKS!!! I almost forgot to mention it! I groomed her before giving her her breakfast, and my friend was standing there with us, and I was leaning against her and just had my arms up against her belly, looking for anything, and something kicked big! I wanted to be sure, so I waited, then sure enough, a few more minutes and we got more kicks! Haha, my eyes got big as saucers and I started squeaking for my friend to come feel, so she squatted down low to put her hand and watch her belly at the same time. Five minutes later, more kicks and visible belly movement!
I’m pretty sure the vet is going to take one look at her, listen with a stethoscope and confirm, but I’m kind of tempted to get the ultrasound anyway so I can have ultrasound pictures for posterity We’ll see, I know I’ll have plenty of expenses to save my pennies for, but I’m slowly going from panicked to proud mommy…errr… grandmommy I guess! Feeling those little belly kicks were just kind of magical
[QUOTE=amastrike;5783630]
Relax. Babies are fun! And hey, you’ve missed out on the last 9 months of stressing, so you pretty much get to jump in where the fun stuff starts. Don’t feel bad about missing her getting fat and bagging up. When you see them every day, it’s hard to notice little changes and it’s not like you were expecting to see signs of pregnancy. Just relax and enjoy the fun and sleepless nights ;).[/QUOTE]
I like this outlook I hadn’t thought about it that way… If it had been a planned pregnancy or if I’d at least been aware of it sooner, I probably would have gone the whole 9 yards freaking out and having the vet on speed dial for month checkups, haha. While I wish I’d known sooner for at least a little more pre-natal care, hopefully it’ll all turn out ok. We’re keeping fingers crossed and saying little prayers, so I’m optimistic
[QUOTE=ClassynIvansMom;5784192]
WE’VE GOT BABY BELLY KICKS!!! I almost forgot to mention it! I groomed her before giving her her breakfast, and my friend was standing there with us, and I was leaning against her and just had my arms up against her belly, looking for anything, and something kicked big! I wanted to be sure, so I waited, then sure enough, a few more minutes and we got more kicks! Haha, my eyes got big as saucers and I started squeaking for my friend to come feel, so she squatted down low to put her hand and watch her belly at the same time. Five minutes later, more kicks and visible belly movement!
I’m pretty sure the vet is going to take one look at her, listen with a stethoscope and confirm, but I’m kind of tempted to get the ultrasound anyway so I can have ultrasound pictures for posterity We’ll see, I know I’ll have plenty of expenses to save my pennies for, but I’m slowly going from panicked to proud mommy…errr… grandmommy I guess! Feeling those little belly kicks were just kind of magical :)[/QUOTE]
The ultrasound won’t show anything that is worthy of saving for posterity. If you have seen the foal kick I wouldn’t even bother having her ultrasounded.
I would recommend “Keeping it Simple”, and going with the
WTF Registry:cool:
I’ve seen that stallions ad on horseclicks: I don’t see anything ‘worthy’ coming of this match that warrants registration. Truly, he is fugly beyond measure. I HOPE it’s gaited to the nines and spotted like crazy-now that might be cute. But if she wants to claim you stole a breeding, and finds this thread, it’ll be your word against her.
I PMed you that you might not air your laundry if the SO is as nuts as you say- yet here you are- I give up! Air on, boo, air on
Get the vet out- Fescue is common as water around here- last thing you need is a dead foal. You need a plan: Very best wishes that the foal is healthy but fescue is a problem; Please just assume she’s been eating it.
[QUOTE=Laurierace;5784207]
The ultrasound won’t show anything that is worthy of saving for posterity. If you have seen the foal kick I wouldn’t even bother having her ultrasounded.[/QUOTE]
I’d still go with at least a palpation. I’m sure this isn’t the case in this situation, but you’d be amazed how many people bring mares to us and SWEAR they’ve seen the foal moving and the mare turns out to be open. They usually don’t believe us when that happens!
