Kamikazi is one of the horses at the ranch. She belongs to our ranch managers and this is the story of how she became a momma. Kamikazi was born in 2013 and is a palomino quarter horse. Her AQHA registered name is Zans Classical Ziva. Her ancestry can be traced back to Skip Premiere and Zan Parr Bar. Due to an injury when she was young one of her knees has had a little bit of scar tissue. Despite this she has always been a sweet horse and a great ride. In the Spring of 2018 she was bred to an outside stud named SD Socks Prevail. This cross was sure to bring a great foal, however that’s not all it would bring.
We could tell Kamikazi was getting close to her foal date from our horse breeding tracker, as well as some general signs you expect in a broodmare about to give birth. Her udder had filled up and her teats were waxy. As this was Kamikazi’s first foal and our ranch managers were out of town for a couple of days, I wanted to make sure that all was going well for the mare. During the night I woke up several times to check on the mamma-to-be. At 3:00am I went out to check on her and found a sweet little baby lying on the ground next to a very sweaty, very nervous looking Kamikazi. I figured she was just nervous with it being her first time giving birth, however, it was later realized that was not the only reason. We’ll come back to that in bit, but first let’s talk about the baby!
When I walked out and saw mamma and baby I immediately ran to the lodge and called our head wrangler and resident veterinary student. I knew they would want to see the new baby and wanted them to be aware of the birth. As we watched her try to stand we realized that because of the weather the previous couple of days, the ground was very muddy. The baby struggled for a while to stand up so we got some towels and tried to create traction for it to get up. After a while we were able to help the baby stand up and get her close to Kamikazi. Throughout this whole process Kamikazi had barely moved from her position. Still sweaty and not sure what had just happened, we tried to let her and the foal figure things out for a while. Unfortunately, it was not going well. The foal kept slipping on the mud, Kamikazi wasn’t letting her baby get anywhere near her to get the much needed colostrum, and the other mares in the arena with them were starting to get curious about the baby.