One of the benefits of my Horsemeister job is that I get to witness the births of these beautiful Friesian foals. We use a FoalWatch kit from Chemetrics to accurately predict when the mares will start to foal. We tried different kinds but always go back to this kit as it seems to be the most accurate.
The first video I included in this blog happened on a beautiful sunny afternoon. This is VERY rare, almost always a mare will foal out in the middle of the night. This was Bunni's first foal and we were very glad she did decide to foal out in the daytime. After watching her closely and seeing that she was not progressing like she should we were able to offer assistance.
This second video is more like what usually happens. On the night that the mare is expected to deliver I plan to sleep close to where I am keeping the mare. I wait for the sound of the mare's water breaking before turning on any lights. Once the water breaks the delivery should happen quickly. The mare foaling in the video below is one of our Tennessee Walker mares named Sally. This filly was actually born on the 4th of July so we named her Liberty.
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