Foal eating mares poo!

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Foxfolly

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As above... why is she doing this?
She's only 5 days old, she's started walking round with bits of hay and also sticking her head into mums bucket so its not like she hasn't got nice things to munch on!!
 
Apparently they do this to get nutrient etc from the mare! Or at least that is what i have heard
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Gross, but they are doing it as premunched food containing some vitamins and minerals

I added some blood salts to my mares feed and foalie has been stealing this and reducing poo eating! (Although she is 2 weeks old now, so may reduce with age?)
 
Certainly don't worry about it - in actual fact it's doing her the world of good. Seriously! When one of our foals was a few weeks old she got terrible diarrhoea which after numerous veterinary treatments still wasn't any better. We then mentioned it to an Aussie racing trainer friend of ours and he said to give the foal a drench using the mares poo. We thought the same as you're problem thinking now - how disgusting - but when I mentioned this to our vet - he agreed and said it does get done over in this country as well. The mares poo will line the foals stomach. So maybe these foals know better than us just what they're doing.
 
They do it for an important reason, which is why you should not clean your field completely when they are young. It's from the dams dung that they pick up the micro flora to inhabit their hind gut which enables horses to digest tough cellular fibre in their hind gut.

These microbes are symbiots, i.e. they rely on the horse to provide them with a home and food and the horse needs them to break down cellulose (plant cell walls) to get to the nutrients in grass/ Hay/ Haylage and other fibre sources that are within those walls. The foal is born without them, so the only way the dam can pass them on is in her dung, she even secretes a chemical substance to encourage the foal to do this.

The reason Horses are faster and more able to survive extremes than cattle are these microbes as the horse does not have to have extra stomachs to carry like cows and horses can eat on the move and don’t have to re chew their food to break down the cellulose.

These microbes are also destroyed by antibiotics and sometimes you will see adult horses doing this after a course of them, so it’s important to give pro biotics after a course of antibiotics as these drugs kill all microbes including the beneficial ones.
 
hiya fox folly, most foals tend to have a munch at their mothers droppings and although it may seem gross to us it plays an important role in establishing healthy bacteria in the foals gut, whats more they always seem to do it when you have a visitor coming to see the sweet little foal you have!!!
 
as many have said perfectly normal, a big problem i had with my orphan foal last year, was that when she started eating, proper food corn and larger quantities of haylage she could not digest it, and got really loose, squirting the walls loose, this was because she had no gut flora, due to not being able to eat mares poo, as her mum died at delivery, so not only is it normal it is important to allow them to do this
 
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