Has anyone tried 'naturally' weaning foals?

[jermajay]

I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that most pregnant mares will wean their foals earlier, and have a fully "dry" period between foals, if left to their own devices. Mares who aren't pregnant are less likely or slower to wean their foals naturally. So the mare wouldn't be producing milk for 18 months straight. Weaning tends to coincide with the pregnancy becoming more taxing on the mare. I think having mares, foals and yearlings in a "wild" herd type environment is very different to how most mares are kept in the UK, so it's hard to draw comparisons.

In the mare I've seen who had a foal on her for a very long time, the older foal was also eating her own feed, then taking a lot of the mum's feed etc, making it hard for the mare to get enough nutrition. The mare didn't seem to have any desire to wean naturally without being pregnant, and ultimately they were separated (gently) when the foal was about 12 months for the sake of the mare.

That makes sense, I wonder if they get some sort of hormone when they're pregnant that tells them to wean the foal, or perhaps their 'mum' instincts switch from the old foal to the fetus? If it was purely that the nursing was too taxing on the mare, I would think they would wean their foal even if they weren't pregnant. Would be interesting to find out whether it's primarily biological, with the pregnancy, or social, as stangs said many mares haven't learnt how to wean their foal.

 

[jermajay]

There are lots of studies on the physiological and behavioural effects of different weaning techniques - have a look on ScienceDirect, OP - and they all suggest a slower approach to habituate the foal to separation, making sure the foal has companions around, are better for it.

I suspect that a completely hands-off natural weaning approach can fail in domestic horses, because many mares won’t have learnt how to wean a foal: they wouldn’t have been weaned naturally themselves, and it’s unlikely they would have been turned out with other mares with foal at foot whose behaviour they could imitate. Domestic herd dynamics have many differences to feral horses’.

I'll check that out!

 

[Britestar]

I never bothered weaning my last foal.
At around 6 months old he was put into a separate stable at night, but back out with mum in the herd during the day.
Neither of them bothered about being separated, but he would suckle during the day.
At one point mum went away for about 4 weeks, but he continued to feed when she came back. She was in work from around 7 months.

He was still feeding at 4 yrs old, 1st thing in the morning when turned out. Looked ridiculous, she is 15.2hh and he's just shy of 16.3hh.

By about 4 and a half he finally stopped. She never bothered about it and would let him.

Even now, aged 14 and 30yrs respectively, you see him occasionally look at her in that way, but she just walks off!