A WARNING TO THOSE WITH JOHN MULE FOALS
By: Tim Cross - Chariton, IA
I am sending a ‘New Arrivals’ picture of T Cross
Farm’s Patchy Britches, our long awaited first foal from our young jack,
Scooter’s Grand Sun. His dam is my wife, Sheila’s, Possum appaloosa
mare, that she rode for several years and this is her first foal too.
Obviously it was a BIG deal to get this foal on the ground, as you can
see he has a ton of color. Pretty much all you could ask for.
The last few years we have been castrating our john
mules very young, as per several ‘experts’, including Robert Miller, DVM
(the imprinting guru), and have gotten along great. If the vet is here
anyway, and both seeds are down, get it over with and not have to worry
about it.
When Patchy Britches was 2-1/2 days old we made an
appointment with out vet to come check some mares, and while he was
here, to castrate the colt. Our regular vet was busy on the day Sheila
was off work, but he now has another vet helping him, and he could sure
come. Sheila thought about it a while and called back, asking to wait
for our guy. We were told, ‘this other vet has a lot of experience and
has done this and that and the other and is really good’. Sheila finally
decided to go ahead with the ‘new’ guy, we’ll call him Doc2. After all,
we were just checking some mares and castrating a foal.
We have always done our castrating out in the yard
where animals aren’t kept, and everything is cleaner. Doc2 wanted to
castrate in the stall (because it was windy). He is the expert, so we
did. (WARNING 1)
Some friends had stopped by to see the foal and Doc2 spent quite a
while explaining to them that you need to castrate mule foals very early
because they get really rank at an early age. (WARNING 2)....the rank
part
We got Patchy down and out and Doc2 proceeded to castrate him. It took
him about half the time it takes our regular vet, and bleeding seemed
to be more, but went okay overall. Already long story made
shorter, after checking the mares, Sheila checked on Patchy and he was
standing in the stall with his intestines hanging out. Doc2 hadn’t
left yet, and he got on the cell phone talking to someone (WARNING 3)
while Sheila and I held the foal down. He finally came in, sedated the
foal again and we proceeded to clean things up to get the intestines
back in. He only had one 200cc bottle of sterile water, so had Sheila
get well water in a pan and got everything cleaned up and went to
putting the intestines back in. It took quite a while and we both
asked about his roughness and hurrying at ‘stuffing’, and he said it
was fine and everything sorts itself out. Seven or eight hours later
sure seemed like Doc2 was right. Patchy was eating good and playing
around.
At 5:30 the next morning he was on his back in the
stall in terrible pain. He would get up and try to nurse, but only take
a tiny amount and lay back down and roll on his back. We called Doc2 and
he suggested we take him somewhere for monitoring, etc., so we headed
for Iowa State, 1-1/2 hours away. There they did exploratory surgery and
found that in the hastened ‘stuffing’ the stub cord from the testicle
had been wrapped around the small intestine and had killed four feet of
it, and that the back side of the body wall had been torn during the
‘stuffing’ and Patchy had another hernia there (FINAL WARNING)
Our options were to spend a minimum of $2,000, and
have a 50 percent chance of Patchy living until six months, but never be
right, or to put him down....we chose the latter.
Here is what I learned for the $1,216 bill we
received from Iowa State:
- Know the vet you use
- We probably won’t castrate that early again, even though it is a 1
in 5,000 chance of ‘complications’
- Ask the vet to check for weaknesses, imperfections, etc. in body
wall while they are in there and the foal is out....and you still have
time to ‘fix’ it
- Try to figure out why, if the rupture comes out the slit in the
body wall the testicle drops out of, you couldn’t have the vet put a
stitch in there to keep from this happening
- It will only happen to the good ones
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