This stuff breaks my heart… 2 and 4 year-old fillies having fillies, starved in drought plagued East Nevada and then rounded up to sell for slaughter. They are SO SKINNY they hardly look like they are about to foal any day – but they are.
Kiki and Keona are both pregnant, both incredibly skinny… rescued by LBL Equine Rescue. They need immediate medical attention for starvation, Kiki is dropping food and needs teeth floating – and both need excellent nutrition if those babies are to be born safely. Sadly, Keona is already bagging-up which means that she could go into labor very soon. Time is of the essence!
PLEASE LET’S HELP THESE YOUNG FILLIES foal safely – and regain their health and the health of their babies! All donations are 100% tax deductible! Thank you in advance!
If you receive this post via email, click here to donate!
The Duck Valley Reservation is a 450 square mile Shoshone-Paiute reservation, over as mile-high in elevation, that straddles the Nevada-Idaho state line. (Approximately half the reservation lies in each state.) The area currently is under severe / extreme drought designations, a condition that has affected both forage and water sources.
Many of the western tribal lands contain free-roaming range horses. During serious drought cycles the free roaming populations not only suffer from lack of nutrition, but their increased quest for food can cause environmental damage. The tribes then come under significant pressure to remove horses and reduce the pressure on the range.
The only significant market for these range horses is the horsemeat industry. A few of the horses get acquired by rescue groups to be tamed for adoption or to be tracked for sanctuary. Keona and Kiki were among some horses found in an Elko, NV feedlot and were purchased in order to remove them from the “slaughter” pipeline.
When acquired, both horses appeared to be pregnant but were significantly underweight. (Their condition is somewhat masked by unusually heavy haircoats.) They also suffered from diarrhea from suddenly being put on rich feed in the feed lot.
The group that rescued these horses experienced an unrelated emergency and had to hand them off to LBL Equine Rescue in Silver Springs, NV. Now the delicate balance point involves increasing their nutrition, but doing so carefully so as not to cause more digestive problems and possible failures in their pregnancies. As they become more stable, they can receive more advanced veterinary care in order to ensure both their health and that of their expected foals improves.
The pinto palomino is Keona. She is already showing signs of her udder bagging up so a foal may appear soon. Kiki is the bay and is the boss. Both horses are currently being fed small amounts of hay and prescribed supplements several times a day in an effort to stabilize their digestive systems.
These were unanticipated arrivals at LBL that weren’t budgeted for. In addition, the mares should receive some formal veterinary care in the near future, and due to the sketchy nutrition while in utero, the foals will likely need special monitoring and support for their first few weeks.
Eventually the mare and foal pairs will be made available for adoption to qualified parties, subject to clearance by the veterinarian.
PLEASE HELP! And THANK YOU in advance! These mares and their babies will have a bright future if we can bring them to health!
Yes, agreed. And this rescue is fully capable,luckily!
The support for the foals, if live births would likely include bottle feeding. We did that following the thankfully live birth of a filly we named “Bunny” as she was born, but not without a struggle, early on Easter morning to a mare with a Henneke 2 body score. The mare was brought to us several days previously (we were not an actual rescue but in the county seizure of a herd we were the only knowledgeable farm with the room to take on a case this bad). There was just enough in the mare’s bag for some colostrum and it was about three weeks before she was able to nurse her baby. It’s a round-the-clock effort to help these highly at-risk foals survive.
A political comment here: the environmental damage is far greater from the cattle and sheep grazing afforded to welfare ranchers than it is from wild horse and wild burro herds. Soil compaction, wholesale destruction of native plants, and ruination of riparian zones by those species dramatically further disrupts the already challenged drought areas – sometimes beyond repair.