A lot of strange things happen while I'm at work. Mini donkeys run me over, stud colts jump on me in a sexual specific sort of way and people feed their baby horses human baby formula. Why would a baby horse drink human formula? The short answer is: they don't.
Several weeks ago the front office got a call from a frantic woman. Her new foal wouldn't suckle from his mom. Instead of calling the vet or encouraging nursing, the woman loaded the baby horse into the backseat of her beat up Towncar and drove it to her trailer park. She spread the colt out on the floor of her home and force fed it through a syringe. FYI - this can be quite dangerous. One has to be careful that the food, water, whatever actually goes down the throat and not into the lungs.
Two days later, the foal is very weak and won't drink anything. When water doesn't work, the woman goes to the store and returns with human baby formula. For HUMANS! Not horses. She loads the syringe with the formula and sticks it down the baby's throat. Of course, the formula isn't going anywhere near the baby's stomach, it's getting shoved down his windpipe right into his new baby lungs. He's suffocating on formula.
Several days and several phone calls later, the Towncar screams up to the clinic and a crew of people jump out of the car. "We've got a baby in the backseat!" They keep screaming at us. Normally when horses arrive at the clinic they do not do so in the back seat of a beat up car. I ran to the car with one of my co-workers and try to unload the black colt from the backseat. We end up making a sling out of a blanket that works well. Inside the clinic, the colt is wheezing badly. He sounds like he's breathing underwater, very gurgly. His vitals don't look good and yellow formula whooshes out his nose as soon as we tilt his head down. The family is still carrying a bowl of baby formula.
The doctor rushes to put a catheter in so we can get some helpful fluids into the colt. I start scrubbing the area and try to explain what I'm doing. "This is betadine. I'm cleaning the area so we can put a catheter in the vein." The lady has a sassy comment for me. "I know what you're doing. I've had horses for 20 years." It's time to shut my mouth. If you've had horses for 20 years then please explain the chain of events that led you to our clinic.
The baby foal died within 30 minutes. He had no chance. He never received his mom's nourishing first milk, he was extremely dehydrated and oh yes, he had baby formula coating his lungs.
The family decides to one up this entire situation with their final move - they load the dead foal into their truck and take it back to the mother.
No word on the mare. Hopefully they don't feed her what's left of the baby formula.
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