Rejection Reaction
Shoultz sent his filly to Tarr’s clinic for help with the intense feeding schedule, and in the hope the veterinarian could find the filly a foster mother.
“Being [grafted onto] a mare is so much better for [an orphan] foal,” Tarr says. “It’s better on its digestion and behavior. Foals get up every hour to nurse on their own. And a mare will teach it to be a horse.”
Tarr says the most common foster mare candidates are mares who have recently lost their own foals, because their maternal instinct and milk production already have been stimulated. In high-volume horse country, such as Kentucky, there are farms that specialize inding nurse mares.
There also are established veterinary protocols that will bring the mammary glands of non-lactating mares into milk production.
The process of grafting a foal onto a foster mare is tricky. Most mares have a natural instinct to reject a strange foal, so it helps to have a mare with a very strong maternal instinct.
“It’s not just a matter of turning a foal loose into a stall with the mare you want to graft it onto,” Tarr says. “You have to be patient and take your time with the mare. We restrain the mare, and usually sedate her lightly, just to slow her down a little to allow the foal to nurse.
“You have to make sure she decides to take it, because if she doesn’t, it’s like flipping a switch, and she’ll turn on the foal very quickly.”
As Tarr worked to find a foster mare for Shoultz’s filly, he noticed another client’s mare take an unusual interest in the orphan every time it went by her stall. Lady Sierras, owned by Heather Foster, had foaled a sorrel filly at the clinic a few weeks earlier.
“My mare kept talking to that little orphan,” Foster recalls. “They finally opened up her stall door one day because she just insisted on that baby. That baby went in and ‘Lady’ mothered right up to it! It’s rare, I think, to [graft another] baby onto a mare when she’s already got one at her side.”
Lady raised both fillies just fine. Foster says Lady’s own filly by Kid Coolsified, now named Charisma, is destined for the halter show ring. Lady is also the dam of multiple American Quarter Horse Association world champion halter mare Pizzazzy Lady.
Shoultz is waiting to get registration papers back from AQHA on the blue roan filly by Blue Fox Hancock. He and business partner Ken Mattsner raise about 60 foals a year, specializing in Driftwood and Blue Valentine-bred horses. Their homebreds include Mr Fritz Wood, a multiple AQHA roping world champion and reserve All-Around Amateur horse at the 2014 AQHA World Championship Show. Shoultz hasn’t decided if the rejected filly will end up in a KeSa annual production sale or not.
Meanwhile, Tarr is surprised yet again by the whims of mares’ maternal instinct.
“Mares like [Lady] are few and far between,” he says, “and when you find them, you remember which ones they are!
“But when you have a mare that is aggressive or a poor mother, you have a decision to make. I personally have zero tolerance for a mare that won’t have anything to do with her foals. She needs to do something else.”
Article originally published in the February 2015 issue of Western Horseman.
