Bottle fed/Hand reared

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Frumpoon

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Wondered if any breeding guru's could give me an insight into the psyche of a horse that was rejected by mum and hand reared...

I have a gorgeous [and gigantic!] warmblood who arrived in the world like this and he's got such an abundance of personality...I just wondered about how cognitive functions are formed in horses that are raised by people...
 
There is an excellent chapter on orphan foals in Richard Maxwell's book "Train your Young Horse".

Becky Chapman (Ashen Equestrian Centre) had a RID called Mac that was hand reared and had an attitude problem as a result. She still managed to retrain him & he went to HOYS in 2005 I think (she saddly lost him to colic last year). She is on Facebook and I'm sure would be happy to talk to you about him, if you're interested.
 
That's really kind of you thank you!!

I wouldn't say he has an attitude problem as such, in fact I think he's adorable with his little quirks but you definitely have to understand his background to understand his behaviour.

This is further complicated by the fact he was sent to stand as a stallion in Poland before being gelded and shipped to the UK....
 
Oh dear...

From what I understand, Mac only had an attitude problem inasmuch as he didn't behave like a "normal" horse - which led to serious miscommunication with his owner. Which is how he ended up with Becky, who is very good with "problem" horses.
 
I think this is a difficult one to answer, without knowing exactly what happened to your chap.

I have a hand reared, he is four this year, and if I didn't tell you he was handreared, you wouldn't know - personality wise, at least. He is slightly physically backward - as a four year old, he looks like a three year old - last year he looked only two, etc.

He is a delight in all ways, but then I worked hard to make sure he would be, from when he was young. In fact if anything, he's actually rather too laid back - except around fillies, but then he is entire, and has just discovered his hormones!
 
all of the hand reared horses I have know/know of have been very difficult attitude wise,mostly due to them not respecting boundaries because people cant teach boundaries as effectively as a mare can.
I dont think there is a problem when they are raised by a horse (or donkey in ballyshan's case!) and just fed by a person, lots of people on here have bottle fed (cant name one! sorry!) and i remember some of them had weaned them on to buckets as soon as possible. :)
 
I raised a pure bred ID filly from a month old after loosing the Dam to a foaling related colic. She was fed from bucket and I was lucky she had a 3 YO sister that adopted her as far as caring and looking after her although she could not feed her as she was a maiden herself. I made sure that I did not spend too much time with the filly apart from feed her every couple of hours she grew into a lovely mare and does not have any problems at all and is respectful of people. As you can see it did not stunt her growth
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:)
 
Spring Feather said:
Feeding milk out of buckets is the way to go. Bottle feeding almost always causes some issues which can become troublesome later in life for the youngster.
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Ah right, I didn't realise this..in fact I'm not sure what method was used, I think bottle for the first 2-3 weeks then a little bucket [from the photos I have at least].

I know he did have a foster mum after a few weeks once he was out of the woods healthwise, an elderly broody who took him under her wing...
 
Rita - your mare is beautiful!!!!

D is very like that, he's a very big, strapping, well built lad of 17hh, lots of bone and muscle...
 
Thank you:) it is just a lot easier to feed from a bucket once they can but the first few weeks would need to be bottle fed. I think the attitude would be more down to the time spent handling the foal as it was very hard for me to feed Gloria and then leave her with the herd especially as she would lay down by the horse box (we stayed up the field for 8 weeks) really heartbreaking, but after the first week to 10 days she would trot over from the herd and drink her little green bucket of milk and trot back to the herd. They are a lot stronger and resilient than we think and sometimes you need to be cruel ie; leaving her, to be kind, it is so easy to spend every spare minute with an orphan or rejected foal as every time you try and leave they follow, I know I wanted to just cuddle Gloria day and night , I still could :)
 
I totally know what you mean, even though he is this gigantic, blossoming 700kg brute I still see him as the tiny, starving abandoned foal in the pictures...he does get away with murder with me...

I think in the first few weeks he was stable-bound under a UV or a heat lamp and the family who rescued him [now my friends in Germany] took turns to feed him as a mare could as far as possible...

Interestingly he scoured heavily during this time and it was eating the droppings of older horses that seemed to restore the balance in his gut...he still does this even now, like a comfort thing...
 
I have a yearling who i hand reared, mum died at 8 weeks but i managed to get him eating foal creep and drinking from a bucket, never bottled him at all, found a weaning buddy for him who keeps him in his place, although he is in at night the filly he's with tells him the rules!! he will spend the summer with my old head mare who will be firm but nice with it!!!
 
I have just sold the second of the two foster boys I reared from a fortnight old. They were never given a bottle, straight from the mare to a bucket (well a large feed scoop first as they don't like to 'bury' their heads in a bucket at that age), didn't take them long to catch on at all and never had any problems with them at all. They also were started on just a handful of Suregrow mixed with moist warm bran fed by hand then from an ice cream tub once they had caught on and they were fed the Suregrow alone. They had separate buckets/bowls but one always finished faster than the other, he was the more dominant of the two too.
I was told to feed them then leave them alone, not to pet them at all otherwise they'd probably have become a bit stroppy; I felt guilty not spending any time with them but it worked, they turned into two very nice characters that knew their boundaries. I was lucky though that I had two together, I can imagine one alone is a lot more work.
 
I have bucket reared mine from birth I find she is fine, I have another which was orphans at 3 months she is very well behaved
Mine tried to suckle off me sice I weened but after lots of shouting and pinching lips she seems to be stopping it now
They will be turned away so hopefully be happy normal horses
It's just disciplining yourself not to mossy cuddle and play in he field and be on the ball really I used to walk in and feed and walk away if Mabel came over balshy she got chased away and she would of shoved me /kicked me if I let her foals are bossy you have to stand up to it and get over feeling bad afterwards lol!
 
Spring Feather said:
Feeding milk out of buckets is the way to go. Bottle feeding almost always causes some issues which can become troublesome later in life for the youngster.
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100% agree, plus bottle feeding is simply impractical when a bucket can be offered as an easy alternative. I've done both, so can vouch for that.

Also, the sooner the orphan can be kept as naturally as possible the better.
 
We unfortunately had a foal orphaned at 5 weeks 2 years ago. She was put straight onto milk out of a bucket and foal creep pellets. We also paired her up with one of our mini broodmares, which we had left empty that year, as a companion. She was not fussed over and her 2 hourly buckets of milk were hung in the stable (out of mini mares reach) and left for her to drink on her own. The only time we ever held the bucket for her was if she was out in the paddock. She would run over for her milk, then once the bucket was finished, she would shoot off to play again. As she grew we introduced her to one of our yearling arab fillies, they spent the winter together and now she is out with all the others. You would never have known that she was an orphan and unlike most big horses she is not afraid of the smaller ones either. :D

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The only problem we did face was that Bunny (her foster mum) did get rather fat on all the adlib haylage :eek:
 
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Not that fugly, Cruiseline, in the grand scheme of yearling fuggliness...
Love the pic of the foal flat out in the stable with Mum standing guard. The size difference is even mote comical :-)
I think the moral of the story is an orphan foal needn't necessarily grow up to be a troubled horse, provided care is taken by humans in the early stages to not "mother" him.
 
I've never reared a foal on a bottle, but have reared many hundreds of lambs, and an awful lot of calves, over the years. They can all be a pain in the arse, for different reasons.

Spring Feather is entirely correct. Assuming that they are orphaned at birth, or within a few days, then they'd probably be started on a bottle, but the sooner that they have a bucket, the better. There is most certainly a stronger bond formed, with a bottle, than a bucket, and it's that bond which leads to the problems, in that you stand and hold the bottle, but with a bucket, you walk away.

That, and as Ginnie says, mummying them!! Not such a good idea, what ever the temptation.

Alec.
 
We had a foal orphaned shortly after birth who after unsuccesful attempts to bond him to a foster mare, ended up bieng adopted by my 4yo dressage gelding. He had to be bottle fed as my gelding would push him out the way and drink from the bucket himself, but we made sure that everything else in his life was as normal as possible. He and the gelding lived out with the broodmare herd and he learnt how to be a horse. He is now a good 18hh so I think the milk replacer did him a bit too well, but no behavourial issues.

On the other hand one of the stallions I work with was an orphan and I dont know how he was raised but he is a ******* with a capital B and has a real problem with wanting to be dominant over humans especially in a stressful situation. Its dangerous and learning he had been an orphan explained a lot about his behavoiur.
 
Seeing as we're showing pics of our orphans/fosters here are mine. Mine were foster mares foals; they were on their dam for a fortnight before the mares were needed to rear TB foals; usually they would have been older and bucket reared at the stud but the foster mares had foaled over a month later than they should have which caused the problems so I had them to rear; Harry arrived the week later.
Freddy a day after he arrived. He was always the bossier of the two and tried it on once or twice with us but a thick ear soon meant manners were restored and after that he was no trouble at all; I dread to think what he would have been like if he had been mollycoddled and not disciplined as the foaling manager reckoned he had been born coming out fighting!
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They were just over a month old here; they were stabled together until the next winter
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They were then introduced to Sylvia a TB filly who became their nanny for a while then they were introduced into the main herd
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And now they're big boys.
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My aunt and uncle had a beef cattle farm and also had a small herd of about 20 goats, which they kept for milk and made rather delicious cheese from.

The point is, all those goats had kids every year, which were not allowed to be raised by their mums as it would have rather defeated the purpose, but hand rearing up to 40 kids (they often have twins or triplets) was not practical either, as this was a working farm, not a petting zoo! I remember they had a "suckling machine" (just a large can with teats sticking out all over the place) which they just put in the middle of the barn and let the kids get on with it.

I guess something similar could be designed for orphan foals, so there is no human at the end of the bottle for very young foals who can't drink from a bucket. In this day and age, I expect there could even be a device on a timer re-filling the can at regular interval, using pre-prepared milk kept in a thermos-type container?

Trots off to the design board & phone patent office :D

Lovely Maesfen - Good job well done x
 
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GinnieRedwings said:
I guess something similar could be designed for orphan foals, so there is no human at the end of the bottle for very young foals who can't drink from a bucket. In this day and age, I expect there could even be a device on a timer re-filling the can at regular interval, using pre-prepared milk kept in a thermos-type container?

Trots off to the design board & phone patent office :D

Lovely Maesfen - Good job well done x
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TBH, although it ca be time consuming but with a bit of patience it's very easy to get them taking a bucket which makes life easier all around.

Only trouble with leaving a bucket with enough milk in it for a few feeds is the foal will usually scoff it all at once which is not good for their system, they need little and often for the first couple of months. That's why I was up every 3 hours through the night, believe me, I wouldn't have been if there had been a choice! :D;) It was bliss once they were able to go through from midnight to 6am at 4 months! :)
 
Wow! Such a lot of good advice and lovely pictures, thank you!!

I honestly think that D was mummied in the early stages because his foster/rescue family [now my friends] wanted to ensure his survival as he was SOOOO desperately thin and weak - his mum was a maiden and didn't get her milk at all and was belting him to stay away from her because of the pain.

When my friends got hold of him he had just had water I believe and no milk or comfort from mum at all, in fact his original breeder could see he was weak and instead of helping him he found a place in the woods to bury him when he eventually died so that he wouldn't have to pay the fohlengeld...very sad indeed...
 
We have hand reared or bottle fed when with their dam three or four.
The first one we allowed the riding school staff to help, it grew up prefering humans to horses and I am afraid after being sold aged 1 the next time I met him was as a very badly behaved 8 year old in my class at PC Camp. We learned to keep the foal a horse after that.
The others all love humans despite us being careful not to cuddle them too much; one has found an owner who is the perfect match, and who is affectionate with the mare on demand.
We still own William who was bottle fed as well living with his dam when ill for many weeks, and it's left him a well rounded sociable chap who takes whatever happens to him in his stride.
By choice I would always use a foster dam if possible as it does make them a bit too "humanised" otherwise, but we also ensure any orphan is kept with another even if only a pony so the eventual integration into a big herd is possible.
 
Yes..I know what you mean, although D will play with horses and love their company, if we appear he pops over to 'check in' with us...

I hope/think we are a good match - although he's a big strapping 'usedtobestallion' he's still very much a mummy's boy and loves cuddles/kisses/nose squeezes/treats which he gets in abundance from all the family...

he is very much adored...it might not be the textbook way but it keeps the peace and both my lads are first and foremost members of the family - jumping/competing/power-machines some way after that...
 
H was rejected by his dam so was hand reared for a while before he was weaned onto a kindly Suffolk Punch mare who had milk to spare. Luckily he was looked after by a very very experienced and sensible stud groom who taught him important things like 'personal space' and 'being polite'. She said he would try and push the envelope with her when he was little and he was quite norty, but she was firm and patient with him. He grew up into a very well mannered horse with a lovely temperament, and I think a lot of that is down to his early care and life training by that groom. He owes her a lot as things could have been very different.
 
Have known one bottled fed one that was totally dependant on humans. it was his owners own making though. They had one mare and she sadly died so they bottle fed without any horse companion. He was pushy asking asking asking all the time, but that's all he knew. He was a two year old when I saw him. Humans own makiing. Poor lad no horse skills.
 
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