Nicole Schnell

Hey guys!  Sorry it's been awhile, things have been pretty busy here the past week.  We now have close to a dozen foals running around on the farm.  A couple have gone during the early morning, I think one night there were 4 in a row, one right after the other.  Our manager didn't get much sleep that night!  They caught one mare foaling out in the field yesterday, but I didn't get over in time to see, I was working at the main farm that afternoon.  They are all very cute though, and luckily no real complications with any of the mares or foals.  We did have to get a nurse mare for one of the foals, the mare was a maiden and just wasn't producing enough milk.  So we now have one foal who has a big belgian mare as her adopted mommy, they're pretty funny to watch out in the field together, it's an odd couple.  The nurse mare wasn't too accepting at first, but she's coming around, and we can let them out alone now without having to watch and make sure the mare doesn't hurt the baby.  We had 2 mares who seemed a little colicky after delivery, but they've seemed to be doing fine.  We had to tube colostrum to one baby because he hadn't gotten enough from the mare, but he is doing fine now.  We've also been teasing all the barren mares and the vet has been out to do cultures on each of them so they'll be ready to be sent to the breeding sheds when they open this week.

Breeding season officially opens Thursday, the 15th.  But we've got a maiden mare we're sending tomorrow to the breeding shed I believe.  If I get to go, I'll be sure to snap some pictures and post them for you guys.  That should be pretty exciting.  Other than that, it has been a lot of work this past week.  We've been moving a lot of horses around to make room for all the new babies and there's been a lot of walking from barn to barn with mares and foals.  We actually have to lead the mares and foals on our own which was pretty difficult to learn how to do at first.  Once the babies have started wearing a halter, which around here is as soon as 2 days after birth, we start leading them out with the mares by putting a little leather strap though the rings on the halter.  Then with the other hand we lead the mare, the baby in between you and the mare.  It was really hard to get the hang of at first, and some of the foals really don't like to cooperate, but the mares are pretty good about being pulled around and most of the babies get the hang of it after the first few times. 

On Tuesday we went to our first Thoroughbred Farm Manager's Club meeting.  That was pretty exciting.  They have it at the Embassy Suites hotel in Lexington, and it's catered, so we got free dinner which was really good.  The veterinarian who did the talk was a neonatal specialist with a board certification in internal medicine.  She gave a short talk about neonatal foals and some of the common problems farms often face with them this time of the year.  It was really interesting to listen to what she had to say, some of it was stuff I had seen at our farm, like the contracted tendons, and some of it was stuff I might be seeing as more foals come.  Then Thursday night we were back at Embassy Suites for a client seminar put on by Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital.  They had five different veterinarians each do a short talk about different topics of interest.  The topics they covered were:  neurological herpes, dental care, dealing with infertile mares, treadmill endoscopic evaluation, and heel pain/foot care.  This was really interesting.  My favorite was the presentation about endoscopic evaluation using the treadmill.  The presenter had short videos of what the scopes look like of various yearlings when they're on the treadmill, and you could watch their airways as they ran and exercised at various speeds.  That was really interesting to me.  Some of the yearlings they had scoped prior to exercise looked really bad, but once they got on the treadmill, their throats opened up and they performed normally.  It was pretty fascinating to me how effective this type of diagnostic testing is, and how much about a horse's future performance as a racer you can learn from it.  It was also pretty funny watching a video of a horse on a treadmill, who would have thought you could ever do that!

I've added a few new pictures, not very many though, I'm sorry.  Just a few of the new foals and some of the day it snowed here.  I'll try to keep posting on here more often and get some more pictures up.  Thanks for the comments!!!