Nicole Schnell

This afternoon was very exciting!  We had a mare decide to foal while outside at around 3:00 this afternoon.  My manager and I had noticed her acting a little funny when we were outside checking the fields this afternoon, but we just kept an eye on her on and off and she seemed to be acting fine.  Of course, when we had finished checking the fields and were in one of the barns with the vet this afternoon she decided to have it!  We were probably gone 20-30 minutes and in that time she had had the foal and was already up and licking her clean.  When we had finished up with the vet we were on our way over to feed the teaser stallion and our vet called my manager and told her we had a foal out in the mare's field!  She had seen it as she was leaving the farm.  The foal was already trying to stand, but we had to get her out of the pasture before any of the other mares tried to hurt her.  We had to roll her onto a blanket and carry her out, and she's a big baby, she was heavy!  We got the foal and the mare out and in minutes the foal was up and walking!  It's amazing how much faster they're able to stand up when outside, simply because the footing is so much better than in the stalls.  We got the foal inside, checked the mare's colostrum, dipped the naval, and gave the baby an enema.  The mare and foal are both doing really well.  It was an exciting suprise to the end of the work day though!

Other than that this week has been a lot of work as usual.  We had one of our maiden mares come in really lame one afternoon over the weekend.  She had some blood on the sole of her foot and it looked like she might have punctured it somehow, so we took x-rays and soaked the foot over the weekend.  But she's doing fine, nothing came up on the x-rays, and she seems to be a lot better.  I also made it out to another foaling last Thursday night.  By the time I got to the barn the mare already had 2 feet out.  This one took a little longer than the first one I had seen.  Apparently the baby was coming out upside down at first and so they had to get the mare up and get her to try to readjust the foal.  After that it was a normal foaling.  The mare is older and has had several foals, so she had a good idea of what she was doing.  I think we have something like 20 foals running around now at the farm!  It's so exciting, there's always something happening and the days are always super busy, but I love it!  The weather has been a lot warmer over the past week.  Well, by warmer I mean like high 40's and sun shine!  But it definitely feels a lot nicer than the teens.  I think the snow is over, finally.  I've posted a few of my pictures from last Wednesday at Rood & Riddle.  I'll take my camera with me to work the rest of this week and get some pictures of all the babies out playing in the fields.  They're too cute to watch playing around!  Until next time...

Today was very exciting!  Unfortunately I didn't get to sleep in this week on my day off, but it was definitely worth getting up early and spending the day at Rood & Riddle.  I got to see all kinds of neat stuff.  I got a pretty good overall tour of the entire clinic today I?d say.  I spent a little bit of time at each of the various buildings and specialty areas and got to see a little of what goes on at each of these different places.  I started the morning off in radiology where I got to help take x-rays.  I actually saw the first quarter horse I've seen since I've been here, and he looked so short after being around thoroughbreds all the time!  We also did x-rays on a yearling that had a hole in the bottom of his hoof.  He had originally had an abscess that had gotten really bad and ruptured and a hole had formed all the way up to the bone.  It looked like it hurt pretty bad!  After radiology I got to go into a couple of different surgeries.  One was an arthroscopy, where they use a scope to look into a particular joint by creating only a small incision.  By doing this they can easily detect the source of pressure or pain in a joint or area of the lower leg.  I also got to watch one of the doctors place screws into a horse's knee.  That was really neat, they actually use a drill to put the screws in, and it took no time at all!  After surgery I spent some time down in the podiatry area and watched a couple of horses have some really neat looking shoes put on.  At Rood & Riddle they actually have a whole section dedicated to horse?s feet.  Their equine podiatry specialists are also trained as farriers so they can diagnose and then treat with corrective shoeing methods as necessary.  I also spent some time in the reproduction area where I got to watch a stallion collection, and then went into the lab where the doctor extended the semen and checked its motility and morphology.  They actually have a computer at the clinic that hooks up to their microscope and it will circle and outline dead sperm so that you can get a better picture of what each sample looks like.  That was pretty neat to see, very high-tech!  I also got to watch a scope on a mare that was being checked because she has had trouble in previous years getting pregnant.  The doctor performed the scope to look at the inner lining of the uterus and then she did a uterine lavage to clean out the uterus in hopes of determining the underlying problem to the mare?s infertility.  Later in the afternoon I got to watch a couple of bladder scopes on two different geldings.  They place a scope up the horse?s urethra and are able to drain the bladder while watching from the inside to see what types of debris are present and what the inner lining looks like.  I also saw a doctor perform a spinal tap on a horse that was suspected to have a neurological condition.  Just as the afternoon was winding up an emergency colic was brought in for surgery and I got to go in on that surgery which was so awesome!  The doctor had the horse?s intestines pulled out and he was moving them around trying and feeling down into the horse?s stomach to find the source of the colic.  The horse was a broodmare that had foaled 4 days earlier and it was discovered that her cecum had become displaced or twisted the wrong way.  The mare made it through surgery fine, and it looks like she is going to be okay.

So today was a lot of fun!  I got to see so many different things, which was really exciting.  I got to meet a lot of different types of doctors and ask a lot of questions, so I definitely felt like I learned a lot!  Tomorrow it?s back out to work at the farm!  I?ll post again soon!           

Hello again.  I've added new pictures!  I got to go on a breeding shed run this morning with on of our mares to Overbrook Farm.  The trip was pretty exciting, but I did a lot of looking and watching.  Once you get to the shed, the stallion workers pretty much take over.  We unloaded the mare and handed her over, and they took it from there.  You first have to present all her paper work, and she has to have a form from a vet saying she has been cultured and the results have come back negative.  After that she's put into a stall next door to their teaser stallion that has a window in between.  They allow her to be teased then bring her out and clean her up and take her into the shed.  Once she's in the shed they put booties on her hind feet as a precautionary measure for the stallion, put a twitch on her and lift one of her front legs to help keep her still until the stallion is able to mount.  And from there, they allow him to breed her.  I was pretty lucky this morning, Ashford Stud had a mare being bred before ours and she was being bred to Storm Cat, so I got to watch that breeding as well.  Storm Cat stands for $500,000 - he's a pretty big name horse around here.

Other than that it has pretty much been work as usual.  I've been cleaning a lot of baby butts this week, we have had a couple foals with diarrhea.  We've also been grooming mares that are going to be sent to the breeding shed in the next week and keeping them clean.  It snowed again over the weekend and has been really cold!  But the forecast for the rest of this week is close to 50, which will probably feel like a heat wave!  Last Tuesday night's class was about equine nutrition.  We had a professor from the University of Kentucky come in and talk about feeding horses for maximum efficiency dependent upon whether you were breeding them or using them as a performance horse.  We were given a bunch of feed analysis sheets and had to try to determine what types of hay each one was after we learned a little about the various types of forages used on area farms.  That was pretty cool.  This week's class is at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital.  We're going to be talking about stallion reproductive anatomy and semen evaluation.  I'm also going to Rood and Riddle on my day off this week to hang out in the neonatal unit!  My farm manager was able to set it up so that I could go and shadow, so that should be fun, I'm really excited!

Hope you guys enjoy all the new pictures!  I'll be in touch again soon!  Pictures

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!!!

Hey guys...lots of exciting stuff happening.  We've got two more foals at the farm.  One was born Wednesday morning, she's a big filly and was born with contracted tendons in her front legs.  What this means is that her tendons are tight and sort of scrunched up, so it causes her knees to bow forward and she has to walk around on her toes.  This is something that can often be seen with foals that are really big if they're forced to fit into a small space in the mom.  We're expecting her legs to straighten out soon, it will just take some time and a little bit of treatment.  There's actually an antibiotic that the vet can give where one of the side effects is that it relaxes the tendons.  So she has been started on this and she's already starting to show improvement.  She was having a hard time getting up in the begining, so we had to bottle feed her some and she's had a couple enemas to help her out as well.  One of the things I've already learned about foals is, it only takes one problem, and from that problem there seems to be a domino effect.  Because she wasn't able to get up and walk around on her own, she couldn't nurse, so we had to be sure she was getting all the milk and colostrum she needed.  Also because she wasn't getting up we had to be sure she was using the bathroom enough and didn't develop colic.  But she's doing really well now, and actually made it outside today for the first time for a few minutes! 

The fourth foal came Thursday night about 8:00.  We actually made it out to the farm in time to watch the whole thing which was really exciting!  We got to help position the baby and do a little bit of pulling as the mom gave birth.  That was probably the neatest thing I've ever done!  I felt like a proud mom when everything was done and over with.  I've got a few pictures added from the foaling, my manager took some of us during the delivery so I'll get those from him and post them as soon as I can.  This foal's a colt, the mare is actually 21 years old!  So it was really lucky everything went so well.

Other than that, it snowed here yesterday about 3 inches.  Today was 12 degrees when I got up to go to work, and the wind chill was even colder!   I think it's only supposed to get colder as the weekend wraps up.  OH, and if anyone's into racing, one of our broodmares has a 4 year old running at Santa Anita tonight.  The horse's dam, Candytuft, is actually a broodmare at our farm right now.  So if you're keeping up with racing at all be sure to cheer for Midnight Lute tonight!  It's the grade II stakes race, The Strub Stakes.   

Be sure to check out the new pictures!