Country life
So nigh of progeny
Denis Wood
Unlike other large animals, horses do not seem to have been intended by nature to give birth to twins, but it sometimes happens that a mare will conceive on two follicles and become pregnant with twins. Most studs nowadays take every precaution to prevent this; the mare's ovaries are palpated when she comes into season and, if two follicles are found, the Mare is hot covered until one of them is ovulated. Twin pregnancies are hard to diagnose after about sixty days and sometimes go undetected. Twins are rarely carried to full term, most often a mare carrying twins will abort spontaneously between the sixth and tenth months and, if born alive, they are generally premature. Frequently one is much smaller. than the other and it is routine practice on a thoroughbred stud to,. put down the weaker twin because, 'for a potential racehorse the early, weeks of growth are of vital importance and a mare would not have enough milk for both. Very few twins ever reach a race-course and fewer become winners.
My daughter who is a vet in' Ireland sent me a sad case history of an old mare with no previous record of twinning or breeding abnormalities but although she was not due to foal until early March ran milk in December. No obvious reason for this could be found and it was decided to keep a careful watch for an abortion. The milk production stopped and the mare became normal again until a few days before she was due, when she produced a large springing (udder) development and began to run milk again. She did this intermittently for two weeks and was expected to foal at any time. Early one morning she went into the first stage of labour with the usual signs of sweating and restlessness which went on normally but slowly so that an examination was made and it was found that the foal was in the breech position, that is with his hind legs coming first and, to complicate the situation further, these hind legs were flexed with the hooves and fetlocks hooked upwards in front of the mare's pelvis, only the points of the hocks and the foal's rump entering the birth canal.
This is a dangerous situation because if the mare strains forcefully she can easily push the sharp hooves through the wall of her uterus. Another hazard with breach births is that the umbilical cord tends to break as it is pulled across the pelvis and, at this point, the foal will try to take his first breath. In a normal birth the head is out in the air at this stage but in a breech birth it is still inside the uterus and the foal is likely to take a big gulp of foetal fluids and drown during delivery. In this case the. foal's hind feet were located and the position corrected by carefully pushing them backwards and downwards until the tip of each hoof could be drawn forward into its correct position in the pelvic canal.
It was not a large foal and the mare's contractions were not so strong as to make this a difficult operation. From then on the delivery of the foal was uneventful "but when born it proved to have no heartbeat and never breathed. All attempts at resuscitation and artificial respiration were unsuccessful; the foal had been alive to within twenty-four hours of its birth but it was impossible to say how or when it had died. Unfortunately, immediately following the delivery of the foal's front feet some of the mare's intestines were found to be in the birth canal indicating that there had been a tear in the uterine wall.
Her condition was by then hopeless and she had to be put down at once to prevent further suffering. Later, when an examination was made to try to locate the precise site of the tear in the uterus a small rough object was found and proved to be a mummified foetus about eight inches long, greyish in colour and clearly recognisable because, in spite of its small size, it had obviously reached about the seventh month of gestation before dying. It is extremely unusual that a mare will support the presence of something dead inside its body, it would almost always be rejected, or sloughed or aborted. For some unexplained reason it did not happen in this case. The presence of necrotic tissue inside the uterus for three months may have weakened or even rotted the wall, making it susceptible to tearing.
If only she had aborted in December, as nature intended, the mare would have survived to have another foal in the following year.
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