Doug Procter welcomes the final 2025 foal as he tackles baked paddocks, protects delicate noses and wonders if a rain dance might help
That’s it! Foaling is done for 2025! The last TGS foal of the season arrived on 16th June at a relatively civilised 11.40pm.
Since the end of January I have been sleeping in two shifts, 6-10pm and 5-9am, and in between, sitting up watching the foaling cameras through the night: these past two weeks have seen me able to return to a normal sleep pattern.
This last foal is out of a non-Thoroughbred former eventer, stable name Pig, and she arrived with us a few weeks ago to foal. The filly is Pig’s first foal and is quite small, which is common in maiden mares. Although the foal is very correct conformationally, and extremely pretty, her owners have named her Piglet, as befits her diminutive size!
All images: Courtenay Hitchcock
The hot, dry weather throughout June meant plenty of fast ground at racecourses, and several new course records were set at Royal Ascot in Berkshire, which ran from 17th to 21st June.
I was particularly excited by Trawlerman’s victory in the Gold Cup. He was the first of Golden Horn’s progeny to win a Group 1 on the flat. We hope this will help the sale of a colt we have bred this year out of one of the stud’s own mares, She’s Gina. He is due to go to the foal sales in December.
She’s Gina’s colt is a particularly nice example of a foal bred to race middle-distance (mile to mile and a half) or staying races (mile and a half plus). He is in total contrast to his best mate, a foal who is bred to race at less than a mile (think of the physique of Usain Bolt as opposed to that of Mo Farah). Their mothers are physically similar to their foals. One mare has won and been Group 3 placed over a mile and a half, whereas the other mare is a half-sister to a US Breeders Cup Turf Sprint winner over five furlongs (see photo below).
Nursery duties
At home on the stud we have had to adapt to the recent hot conditions. With the lack of rain, the ground in our paddocks is very hard. We have a few mares whose foals have slight conformation faults, and our farrier attends to them regularly. These foals are kept in small groups in smaller paddocks: The hope (often in vain) is that this discourages too much galloping on the hard ground. Too much jarring through their legs can irritate the growth plates in their joints and be detrimental to our efforts to correct their defects.
With the unrelenting summer sun, mares and foals with pink noses have sun cream applied on the morning feed run – left untreated, they run the risk of severe and painful sunburn.
One mare is particularly sensitive to the sun, so we have been bringing her and her foal into a stable during the hottest part of the day to get her out of the sun altogether.
Old school air-con
In this hot weather, with no air conditioning in our elderly tractor, we have to tie the doors open with baler twine to create a slightly cooling through-draft. We have needed to do a lot of paddock topping (lawn mowing on a grand scale) as we have moved stock around between fields. Unfortunately, horses are very picky grazers – they will eat some areas bare and leave others like a hay field. So we need to cut the longer grass to ensure the mares will eat the younger, shorter growth, when they are turned back in. To further mitigate the heat, we have been heading out topping in the relative cool of the early morning and late evening.
The foals themselves also have to adapt. As their own tails are not yet long enough to be effective fly swats, they often stand with their heads in their mother’s tail to help keep the flies away.
Mares without foals at foot can often be found standing in a small circle, each with their heads within fly squatting range of the tail of the mare infront.
As we head into July, with more sunshine forecast, we are threatening to challenge our staff to come up with the best rain dance!
If this works, you’ll find us whingeing next month that we’ve had too much rain, but for now we will dream on …
