> Right now it is very icy though. It rained for a days on frozen ground, so > the moisture didn't sink in but pooled.
Oh, gosh, there's been a big thread on the gaitedhorse list about frostbite in horses, and Jeannie posted this story: Several years ago now, we lost a foal to the after-affects of frostbite and extreme cold, and it was a tragedy none of us will ever forget, on several levels ..... Normally, we breed our mares in late April or May, primarily because of weather conditions .... we don't ordinarily get extreme cold in that area, but we do get heavy rain in the Winter, and extreme mud ... which, because the land there at our old place was dead flat adobe clay and didn't drain, may not completely dry before mid- April. So, we wanted the foals to hit the ground in warm, sunny weather, on firm, grassy paddocks. In other words, we didn't have full term foals arriving in the dead of Winter. One December, we were having an unusual amount of rain so the ground was saturated and starting to puddle, and then just before Christmas, we had a few days of what was extreme cold for our area .... we hit 12 degrees on Christmas Eve in an area where previous record lows ran in the upper 20's. We had five of our older, open mares down in one fairly dry paddock next to the barn because they were a little down from the extreme cold and wet, and we wanted to supplement them. Normally they would have been inside the barn, but pipes had frozen and burst the two previous nights, and several of the stalls were still flooded... we only had two sump pumps, but they were running full time. Although this paddock was less wet than most, it still had a few deep puddles which froze solid in the early morning. We were all eager to eat breakfast and get to opening packages, so the whole family piled out to help with the feeding firrst thing Christmas morning, and after finishing the stalls down the barn aisle, we walked out the back door to that first paddock, to see all the mares standing in a circle, facing inward ... and to our horror, lying on the ground in front of them was a snow white, extremely large and obviously newborn foal!!!!! Now, none of these mares were supposedly bred and certainly none had looked remotely in foal ... our stallions didn't just run out with the girls, and we hand bred most of them, or turned them into a small breeding pen with one or two mares under very supervised conditions. Our studs never got loose to run with the mares by accident. We don't GET surprise pregnancies, and certainly not this big, four months early! We lived in an isolated area, with no other stallions within miles of us, and we SURE would have noticed if we came up with an extra guy one morning! To this day, we have no idea where that foal came from, and it didn't look like anything we'd ever produced ... for starters, it was HUGE, heavy boned and thickly muscled. Our MFT aren't usually very big horses at maturity, and the foals we produce are born refined, and slow growing ... this was a MOOSE. But, we caught up each one of the mares, and looked thoroughly for any signs at all of having given birth, and not one of them was bagged up, swollen, had signs of bruising or tearing, or even so much as a soiled or damp tail, and none seemed to be feeling motherly towards the foal. I keep pretty close watch on my horses, and a "secret" pregnancy was pretty hard to imagine, even if one of our studs had been out one day. It was a mystery we never solved, and we've always been suspicious that some stock horse rancher up the highway, who bred for early foals, had walked out to find this pure white elephant, had a complete hissyfit, and hauled the thing out, to dump on us. . That paddock was a short walk from the road. But, the mystery of its birth soon took second place to the immediate crisis ... this newborn foal had an extremely thick, wooly white coat that had of course been sopping wet at birth... and it was lying in one of those now-frozen puddles and the wet hair had frozen to the ground and the foal had been stuck!!! Clearly, the large, powerful foal had been struggling for hours to get up, and in the process, as we soon learned, had wrenched her spine, as well as torn huge patches of hair from her skin, so that when she collapsed back onto the ground, her bare, exposed skin had frozen. The upper side of her body looked fine, but when we finally got her up, on the underside of her body where she been lying flat out on the ground, the bare skin was all black, dry, and dead-looking, in huge patches. by the time we discovered this poor creature, the sun was coming up and it was warming up enough that we were able to break her loose and help her partially up, but she was too weak to stand, so we had to find a sheet of plywood and make up a sort of skid, and then we slid the foal onto the wood and dragged her into a stall in the barn, while one of the kids ran for the phone to find a vet.... not an easy task, on Christmas morning! Guess not many vets believed a pre-teen who called to say we had a foal frozen stuck to the ground! Only one of the mares was even remotely interested in the whole activity by this time, and so by process of elimination when she turned to watch us hauling the foal out of the paddock, we grabbed her up and brought her into the barn with the foal. She'd had a foal the previous year, but we'd become concerned that she was losing so much weight that season ... a very, very gentle mare, she certainly hadn't looked as if she was carrying this huge foal and didn't have "a bag" but after a few hormone injections, she began producing a little milk, and after several minutes of confusion, did stand and allow the foal to attempt nursing. We were never completely convinced she was the mother, but she did begin producing milk, with the stimulation. I'll shorten the long, sad story, to say that the foal was never well enough to stand up on her own. Her hips and hind legs were too weak to lift her considerable weight. We contemplated taking her to UCDavis Vet School, but the vet felt that the long trip would probably kill her, it wouldn't do anything to improve her chances and was quite frankly, a waste of money. If she did somehow survive, great ... but her chances were almost nil.. We did hope that we could save her, but she just went from bad to worse. If we lifted her up and held her upright for a while, she could stagger over to the mare, but she couldn't get up on her own. The vet who did finally agree to come out, stayed for half a day and set us up with the frozen colostrum and medications and came out each day for a week, and we all took turns staying out in the barn 24/7, to get the foal back up every hour to feed , but she got progressively weaker each day, and only lived about 12 days. It wasn't anything to do with Lethal White syndrome, it was the damage from the frostbite and the exposure. So, in this case ... we can be pretty certain the frostbite came from complete hair loss, and we suspect the tissue damage went a lot deeper than just those surface layers of exposed newborn skin. She probably had organ damage as well, but we couldn't bring ourselves to subjecting her to autopsy. Jeannie ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Judy http://icehorses.net http://clickryder.com
