Reducing Stress in Mare and Foal during Weaning
With a little preparation, weaning a foal doesn’t have to be terribly stressful for foal, mare or owner. Some owners prefer the traditional method of abruptly separating foal and dam at a predetermined time in the foal’s development. While that has been the preferred method for owners who don’t have the time or space to devote to a more drawn-out weaning process, the abrupt separation brings up enough health problems that many horse experts say it isn’t worth it. With modern research on horse health, methods of weaning have undergone some simple changes with more positive effects for all involved.
Preparing Your Foal for Weaning
The main idea behind successfully weaning your foal is to teach him relevant life skills before weaning, to maximize health and minimize stress and general upset. Horses that weaned in the old style of being forcibly removed from their dams with little or no preparation have weakened immune system responses that can lead to illness, may lose weight and body condition during weaning, or may develop overly aggressive or timid personality traits. Preparing your foal by handling, leading, creep feeding and proper immunization practices will help him meet the weaning process with physical strength and mental flexibility.
Start with a Healthy Foal
If your foal has recently suffered from an illness or injury, postpone weaning until he is fully recovered. It’s better to wait a few weeks more to wean than it is to start a foal on a weaning regime before he’s regained a good body condition.
The “Right” Age for Weaning
Most horse experts say to wean your foal between three and four months of age, but proponents of natural horse rearing sometimes wait until the foal is between seven and nine months. At 120 days after birth, mare’s milk can typically provide only 30% of the foal’s nutritional needs, and long nursing can deplete a brood mare’s BCS. Typically, mares will dry up naturally around the six month mark, but when mares wean their foals on their own, they will probably start refusing the foal somewhat earlier. If a mare is in foal again, she’ll chase her foal off: it’s Nature’s way of starting the new birth cycle by conserving the mare’s energy for the coming foal.
Handling
Most horse trainers agree that the sooner you start handling your foals, the more comfortable and trainable they are going to be. Horses need to learn what it is to be touched, to have their feet and mouths examined, to be stroked and curried and occasionally prodded. If your foal is used to being handled from birth, you’ll save a lot of time and energy over the course of its life. You’ll also diminish its risk of injury and make it easier for the vet to do his or her job when it comes to routine and emergency horse health care.
Leading and Halter-breaking
A foal that’s been taught to walk on a lead will be easier to deal with in weaning, because there will be times when you want to move him from stall to paddock, from corral to pasture and back again to the stall. Don’t wait until you want to wean your foal to start training him to lead: have him already comfortable with a lead and halter before ever starting to wean. Weaning, being such an important and potentially stressful time, shouldn’t be accompanied by any other new training activity. Leading and halter-breaking are two crucial parts of training your foal; don’t combine them with weaning, or the misery of weaning may become confused with the trials of learning to lead.
Creep Feeding
One of the best things you can do for your foal is to start him on “solid foods” long before attempting to wean. By the time a foal reaches three or four months of age, the mare’s milk won’t be meeting most nutritional needs anyway, so you will have to supplement the milk with baby food like foal pellets, grass and hay. Most foals, given the opportunity, will learn from their mares or others in the herd that grass is for nibbling and hay can be chewed. But by the time they’re three or four months old, you’ll want to have them eating out of a creep feeder, even though they’re still nursing. Making creep feed available early on helps the foal to learn that there’s a new option in dining: ideally, long before weaning starts, your foal will already know how to eat from the creep feeder and will relish his feed.
Worming and Immunizations
Depending on where you live, your foals will get their shots at different times of their life cycle and the year. Ideally, you should schedule any deforming or vaccinations well before (at least one week) and some time after weaning is completed. Stress compromises the immune system, setting up your foal for an increased risk of illness during weaning: minimize the chances of sickness by working immunizations and other medical procedures around the weaning process. (Expect complete weaning to take around a month.)
Psychological Issues
Some foals, like human children, stay attached to their mothers longer than others. Horses’ personalities vary, and some foals will be mentally ready for weaning sooner than others, just because of their psychological makeup. If your foal stays very close to his dam at all times and panics if separated for a minute, it’s probably too soon for weaning. You can help things along by providing playmates—either other, easygoing foals, a surrogate mare for a babysitter, or even a donkey or goat for a friend will make a difference. This is another place where a relationship with a human handler can take up the slack: if the foal has formed an attachment with a person, he can take some comfort in the normal routines of exercising, play, grooming and training.
When a foal wanders off on his own to explore, runs off to play with others or forms a friendship or attachment to an animal not his dam, he is securely attached to her and shouldn’t be overly upset by the separation demanded by weaning.
