Thursday I witnessed one of the most beautiful and sacred things on earth. Birth.
Meet, out filly. Born on June 7, 2012 at about 10:30 am
Sorry if you are sqeamish about this picture, this is one of the only ones I could get to load! It's just the bag hanging out after her water broke, if you look really really hard you might be able to see the tips of the baby's feet.
It all happened soooo fast!
Bailey busted the gate to get out of her pen at about 6:45 am on thursday, I put her back in at about 7 and then fed her, then after we ate breakfast I put her into the pasture at about 9 am and I went to check on her at about 9:45 and I saw that she was starting to have contractions but I figured we still had several hours of first stage labor to wait through, so I ran and got Ma and when I came back her water had just broke! I called Cathy and she came over to watch
After she had been in active labor for about 25 minutes we could still only see her(the filly's) front feet so we called her(Cathy's) husband Wendell to bring his calf pullers to pull the thing out and in the mean time Cathy and I started pulling and we got the nose out and broke the sack so that she could breath(she was starting to suffocate)
when he got there he slipped the chains on and we started pulling she came about 3-4 minutes after that.
It was kind of a rought birth, and if we hadn't of been there poor Bailey would have been dead 3 times over, NOT KIDDING!!!
Because 1, the filly was too big for her( and she is a maiden mare) and she was starting to give up and she was reaching that 30 minute mark where the foal will die if left in longer than that so Wendell the AWESOME and me had to pull her out. (Wendell's wife Cathy is AWESOME to and helped a ton as well!)
2. because right when the baby was born the umbilical cord broke instead of staying attached and she was squirting blood everywhere so we got that tied off with a bit of twine and
3. she had a retained placenta and after about 5 injections of oxytocin per the dr's orders(i'm so glad I bought some ahead of time even though ma had to pick up some more that day 'cause I ran out!) it still wasn't coming so we had to take her to the vet at about 7 pm the same day and the poor vet had to manually remove most of it. she and the baby had to spend the night in Gooding because it still wasn't coming. The vet said she passed it about an hour and a half after we left I think we left at about 8:30. He had been peeling away the placenta that WHOLE time, it was still very firmly attatched I guess!
AND if all of that wasn't enough, she wasn't producing enough milk for the baby even though she had been STREAMING milk for WEEKS!!! I had thought that that much oxytocin would stimulate enough milk( that is one if its properties) if that was a problem, but it didn't, maybe we have fescue grass in our pasture that I didn't know about??? So now she is on oral domperidone to help with that, along with banamine(a NSAID) to help combat the threat of laminits from the retained placenta. She also got a shot of long lasting antibiotics at the vets...sooooo...she's pretty drugged up!
that baby is just so stinking cute! But I still can't figure out what color she is...any ideas anybody? she's sort of buckskiny but she's startin to get what sort of looks like a dorsal stripe, but neither of her parents have a dun gene. her legs also fade out instead of get darker so maybe she won't go buckskin. Who knows! I'm just hoping that she doesn't go red(sorrel, chestnut or blood bay) but brown might be okay! But I think that it would be pretty hard to because of the stud's genetics, I've only ever seen color out of him, even when breeding to a red mare like Bailey.
Another funny thing about her is the filly was supposed to be a colt from the ultrasound, so we didn't really look when she was born, we had all just been calling it a him for 9 months! But about five hours later I was playing with her and realized it wasn't a him, it was a HER!!! So we have a filly instead of a colt, I thought I was DONE with mares, sheesh!
And no, she does not have a name yet. However my mom's cousin Sid(the stud's owner) said that we should call her question or q for short since her forehead marking looks kind of like a question mark and because of her interesting and questionable gender.
They are both healthy and happy now, dispite their trauma! Isn't she sooooo cute???
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This was her last night Bailey had been an AWESOME mom so far!
I'll try to post more pictures later... |
