The Story of Hewey - part 5
...and still there's more to come...
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After trying to contain Hewey somewhat unsuccessfully for a few days we had to find a new solution for walls. We decided that we could attach gates to the stable walls to fence off the corner of the stable. We had already been intending to do this as a more permanent intensive care section for foals so now was a good time to do it. Hewey of course had to be temporarily moved out as our stable walls are concrete and the drilling would be pretty noisy. We already knew that he could be funny about noise as he really hated it when someone was sweeping the breezeway!
| It was now the 8th of February and we had everything organized to do the modifications. We only had to move Hewey out. He had other ideas though and was refusing to budge out through the stable door. It is suprising how difficult a 36.5kg foal can be to move. Richard suggested "because he thinks that you’re his mother why don’t you just see if he will follow you as if you were a mare". So I walked out and headed for the other stable with Hewey trotting along behind me! |  |
I think that Hewey had mixed feelings about his new walls. They were good because he could see through them but he could now no longer reach his family or ‘belongings’.
Hewey was now consuming more milk every day. He was up to about 10 litres now and we needed to start considering the colonization of his intestinal tract with normal gut organisms. Much of the digestion in the adult horse is by microbial fermentation and the foals acquire these microbes initially by coprophagia, that is by eating their mothers’ faeces. This of course was not going to happen here! No one that I consulted with could accurately tell me at what age this needed to happen nor how much they needed to ingest. There was only anecdotal evidence available so we had to wing it. We would also have to hope that Hewey actually learned about eating grass and hard feed as he didn’t have the benefit of copying his mum.
So we tried mixing fresh faeces with milk in the hope that Hewey would drink it. It was of course slow because too much proved unpalatable. It was also very painful as it made the washing up much more difficult. This idea lasted only a day or so and we decided to use the commercial probiotic powder, Protexin. We added this to the milk for about 10 days and hoped that this would be sufficient.
| We were now midway through February, to make life a bit easier we decided to switch Hewey partially to bucket feeds. He still had bottles but the quantities were easier in a bucket. It was also now that I was having trouble keeping up with the milking so we started supplementing with Wombaroo mare milk replacer. Also I drew the line at continually getting completely soaked if it was raining during milking. |  |
We did want to keep Gloria contributing though as 1) it helped financially and 2) I had the undying hope that someday she would take her job back! This was also the reason we kept him partially on a bottle rather than switching completely to a bucket.
The 16th of Feb was the first class of the Equine Studies group for the year so Hewey had a very big and disrupted day. I had to leave him for most of the day which he did not like even though he still had someone with him constantly. Because of this he really reduced his milk intake (from about 12.5 to 8.5 litres) which was a concern but he was otherwise OK so we just monitored him closely. During the night when he was asleep I ducked out a couple of times to check the ‘imminent’ mare. However Richard was on duty for this one so I did not have to ‘watch’.
On the morning of the 17th of February, a little before 6 o’clock, my phone rang. It was Richard to say that Belle was foaling. This was the second of our frozen semen conceptions by Regardez Moi. So Hewey had to stay on his own while I went to assist with the delivery.
| This mare had done the right thing and at 341 days gestation delivered a brown colt who weighed in at 48kg. He had two hind socks, one with an instantly obvious black patch, hence he was named Patch almost immediately! Belle is quite a bit smaller than Gloria so the size of Patch gave a good indication of how much Hewey was lacking. As soon as we could the new arrival and his mum were installed in the stable next door to Hewey and I was back to ‘mother duty’. |
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PatchHewey was conceived two days after Patch so we were about at the point where he should have been born!
We weighed Hewey again to get his ‘birthweight’ and thankfully he was only a little behind Patch at 45.5kg, so our feeding regime was obviously fairly well spot on. Of course in height he was a lot smaller. As we were pretty busy in the early days simply ‘preserving’ Hewey, not a lot of size measurements were taken. However we did measure him a few times both before and after Patch was born. For comparison I have included a table showing some heights of each at different ages.
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On the day of Patch’s arrival Hewey’s routine was of course a bit messed up once again and he consumed only 9650ml of milk but as he was healthy and there was good reason for the drop we were not too concerned.
The following day he was back to normal (and some!) and had a whopping 16370ml! Now the only worry was that he would burst!
Unlike most of our foals, Hewey had not really had any leading lessons to this point.
| Of course not being able to stand on his own in the early days was one reason but the other was his tiny head. We had some very small foal headstalls but they had positively drowned him. By now as he had grown and could walk on his own it was time for some training.
We had one particularly small headstall which with the addition of a number of extra holes could be made small enough for Hewey. So we fitted this and made a couple of trips into the yard to visit Gloria. I was still planning that she would eventually take over the maternal duties despite the fact that neither she nor Hewey was keen on the idea. |
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At least by now he was not so afraid of her as he had become used to her presence over his gates.
Hewey was now about 6 1/2 weeks old and was consuming up to 18.5 litres of milk per day. He was able to walk on his own and would feed both from the bottle and from a bucket. Whether on not he would really lead was debatable as he would go anywhere that I went. He was pretty happy with his 1/4 of a stable world, as long as I did not try to leave the stable that is!