Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose

We had kind of a rough morning on Tuesday. One of our Archangel daughters, Bellafina (maternal daughter of our dearly departed PPPeruvian Pachelbel and the dam of CCNF Pachelbel, Bellerophon, and Expialidocious), who was out grazing an outer paddock with our large group of pregnant females due later in the year, was found to be miscarrying her pregnancy. The harsh reality is that with 60 to 75 females due here every year, we always expect to see some of this sort of thing, it’s just par for the course. Of course as often as not, it’s one of our more valuable animals that this stuff happens to!

Not due until mid October, Bellafina’s cria was nowhere near viable, so that was never in question. The questions that were at hand though were what had caused the pregnancy to terminate — sometimes you get a satisfactory answer, sometimes you don’t — and also more importantly to us in the immediate aftermath, why was poor Bellafina lying on her side shaking in the first few hours following the miscarriage?  The delivery of the cria/fetus had required some assistance from Jennifer, with one horn of the placenta already hanging out when we first found Bellafina. Jen actually had to go in through the placenta to get to the cria and get it through the cervix, then help Belly deliver the rest of the pregnancy, which all stayed interconnected throughout. Though gruesome for it’s own obvious reasons (see picture #1 below), it was not as though there had been any large amount of blood involved (not that was visible externally at least) so we were on pins and needles for quite a while until Bellafina started to show signs that she was slowly returning to her normal and it must be said, slightly ornery, self later that afternoon and evening. Belly’s body temperature was normal throughout though and within a couple hours of the delivery, she was gingerly (and briefly) standing up to drink water and munch on some hay we had brought into the Arena’s warm room for her. On our vet’s advice, we did also administer both Banamine as well as some injectable antibiotics: the former to deal with pain and inflammation from the delivery, the latter to fight off the possibility of infection.

As for the fetus and pregnancy itself, we feel fortunate that this was one of those occasions when we were able to find a proverbial smoking gun. The umbilical cord had somehow become so twisted (see photo #2), that it was pretty clear that the blood supply to the cria had been cut off resulting in fetal death and the subsequent miscarriage. Though obviously still disappointing (the little boy was to be Bellerophon’s full sibling), it’s always a relief in such situations when we can point to something fairly obvious and more importantly, something seemingly out of our control. Though we’ve certainly seen our fair share of miscarriages over the years, this particular scenario was a new one of sorts. We hope not to see another one like it again anytime soon…

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