Well, that’s different…

It has been an interesting few days here at the farm. Monday dawned with the news that one of our skinny mommas in the Arena’s warm room, Awesome Blossom, was stumbling around and eating sand. Never the the greatest start to any week. Though we knew that she had lost a lot of body condition recently — the very reason she had been moved into the warm room with a few other females and their respective crias where they all have been given access to a free-choice grain feeder — she had in fact already put 5 lb. back on over the previous week so we had thought that we were at least headed in the right direction. Needless to say that when we had her blood tested on Monday, it came back showing a level of anemia that would normally be associated with a dead animal. Her pulse at one point was as high as 140, as her heart rushed to oxygenate her body while working with with less then half of its normal load of red blood cells. After some stops and starts in the end it was a blood transfusion from one of our non-breeding males that, at least for time being, brought poor Blossom around. Though a transfusion was not something we’d ever had to do before, nor is it anything we hope to have to use again any time soon, it’s a good skill to have in our (read: Jen’s) back pocket so to speak. Blossom, for her part, is stable and acting normally again for the time being. No smoking guns were revealed in any of the other lab results we received back, so for now we will stay on the path we were on prior to her crash and hope we can to nurse her back to good health again. Time will tell.

Then yesterday as I was headed off to pick up our youngest from school, Jennifer got a call from Eric up at the Arena that one of our females in the maternity ward, Masala, was birthing out a touch prematurely. The baby turned out be a little peanut (13 lb.) of a bay black boy with dark points, one of the color configurations we’ve seen several times now in this first batch of crias sired by Matrix Majesty. In the end, all was well and Jen had the little dude up and nursing in short order but not before noticing that he was born with a small sack of tissue of some sort tangled around one of his rear legs. It took Eric’s utility knife to both cut if off of the cria and then open the sack itself. What was inside (see picture at left) was what would appear to have been the remains of our newest colored cria’s would-be twin! Based on size and development, we’re guessing that it died around three months of age and thankfully didn’t also lead to the miscarriage of its sibling as well. Though we had one set of live birth twin females born here several years ago (Damask and Tanzania’s older sisters, Satin and Lace, who have since gone on to have crias of their own), the vast majority of twin pregnancies here, or at least those that we have been aware aware of, have ended in miscarriage, most often between 3 to 5 months of gestation. As you can see below, the surviving twin in this case seems to be doing just fine though. Even 15 years into this adventure of ours, we’re still seeing and experiencing new stuff all of the time. Never a dull moment.