Behold this child

My sister took this photograph. (Click on it for a better look.) It shows Sky, a Thoroughbred mare, and her first foal. The foal's about 5 minutes old.

Because it was her first foal, Sky had no idea what was happening when she went into labor. First she felt bad, and then she felt really bad, and it hurt a lot, and it went on and on. That's a big foal, and labor was difficult. The foal got stuck twice, even with two people pulling on it.

In the picture, Sky is astonished and thrilled. A baby! There's a baby! It's her baby! Sky, like a lot of mares, always liked foals, but could never get her hands on one, so to speak. Their mothers wouldn't let other mares near them until they were older.

My sister, Dr. Sarah McCarthy, is an equine veterinarian, and she helped me decode Sky's expression. That wide eye means just what you think. It's true Sky's glancing at the camera, but that's not why her eye's so big. She's wide-eyed with amazement. A child of her own has magically appeared in front of her (and just as she was getting over the worst colic ever). As described in Becoming A Tiger, some first-time mare mothers have been known to get up from the straw and walk away, not having any idea that there's a baby horse in the vicinity. My sister knows of cases where a mare has to be grabbed as she walks away, led back, and shown the foal she'd just given birth to. Wow! Look, a baby! Wow!

Sky's ears are straight up, which shows excitement and attention. Her neck is stretched out in eagerness. Also, and this is harder for a non-horse person like me to notice, Sky's lips are protruded and her nostrils are flared, as she drinks in the delightful smell of her new child. She's beside herself with joy and surprise.

I met Sky's chestnut filly when she was 5 days old, racing around, doing little kicks and leaps, followed every moment by the still rapturous but much calmer Sky.

Next time Sky goes into labor, she may suspect what's coming. My sister tells me that Rosie, one of her other horses, had definitely figured it out by the time of her 3rd foal. Alerted by a 3 a.m. phone call that Rosie's water had broken, she went down to the stall. As soon as Rosie saw my sister she began to nicker tenderly as a mare does to a foal. It was as if a woman in labor greeted her obstetrician's arrival by saying, “Oh, who's the best little baby in the world?”

[This photograph is copyright by Sarah McCarthy and may not be used without her permission. You may not, for example, put it up on a LOL cats site, with the horse on the left captioned I CAN HAZ FOAL? and the horse on the right captioned CALL ME CHEEZBURGER.]

Comments

[Llanera]

Thank you for the translation from equine. I'd have had no idea what those signs meant, but each one makes perfect sense to me -- and the foal is definitely not anybody's cheezburger.

[Claudia]

I would expect a wile animal to care and protect it's young out of instinct (I had a chicken attack me once when I tried to pick up her chick), but it seems to me that Sky is thrilled with her foal in the same way a human mother would be thrilled with her baby. That's amazing!