Nurse Foals: The Throwaway Horses
Breeders utilize nurse mares to save the lives of orphaned foals, but the practice requires those mares to leave their own foals behind. While breeders, researchers and equine rescue groups grapple with this ethical dilemma, other horsemen are working to give those foals a meaningful role in the horse business.
Story by Ryan T. Bell
A horse trailer backs up to a barn at Last Chance Corral, an equine rescue center in southern Ohio. Out clamber a half-dozen newborn foals, ranging in age from just a few days old to a few weeks. Their coat patterns and conformation represent a hodgepodge of breeds: Quarter Horse, Paint, Appaloosa, Percheron, Thoroughbred, maybe even a dash of Shetland pony. For all their apparent differences, the foals share one thing in common: they are orphans created by a nurse mare industry that thrives just across the state line in Kentucky.
“They’re only born so that their mothers will then come into milk,” says Last Chance Corral’s founder, Victoria Goss, appearing in an upcoming documentary, Born to Die. “[The dam] will nourish a Thoroughbred baby so that its mother can go and get rebred, because her job is to…
