Anyone who has ever visited Kitchwin Hills will have driven up the meandering road that cuts through the successful Polo Stud neighbouring us.

The Archibald family have owned the adjoining property since the early 1940’s breeding cattle and highly sort after polo ponies.  Their horses are free-range over a large acreage of mountain country and are renowned for being tough, fit and hardy horses that are sort after throughout the world!

Stallions and mares roam together over large areas, foals are born and have to keep up from day one, no grassy foaling yards or box confinement, its keep up or........

Over my 15 years at Kitchwin I have watched these horses closely, from mare behaviour when being courted by stallions to the way the stallions go about their business with a large number of mares. As a result I have changed many practices having observed so much natural behaviour right on Kitchwin’s doorstep.

The most significant observation has been of the foals!

Every stud in the world (including KWH until three years ago) is guilty of over-confinement with newborn foals!  Wherever foals are born, more often than not they have limb imperfections. Commonly, they will have things like rotation and deviation from the knee and hock, soft pasterns (down on their bumpers) and being over at the knee, among others.

All of these problems are seen in our neighbour’s polo pony newborns, and they are given one essential element that is extremely cost efficient and is often the last thing administered on our intensively managed and groomed Thoroughbred Studs throughout the Hunter!  Exercise and lots of it!

Over the years I would drive past and see little foals with massive limb deformities in paddocks of up to 1000 acres.  I would wonder how on earth they will ever make it but within a few days I would be questioning if I was looking at the same foal as they were completely perfect, strengthened in no time and bouncing around their mothers as they climbed the mountains.

Any weakness in our priceless thoroughbred foals at birth makes Stud Managers all over the world run for stable confinement, believing this will help these foals dramatically improve.  Guess what, Mother Nature knows best!

Here at Kitchwin, especially over the past three years, we have been very aggressively putting foals out and the results have been amazing (including our x-rays)!  Exercise with these limb deformities is the key especially when they are light in condition (just born).  I started by putting them straight out, yes straight out, no matter what!  Saying to myself I'll bring it in tomorrow if I'm not happy (remember you can always bring them back in) but we never do.  A foal’s weight will double in its first month of life, so confining them and then asking them to improve while carrying this extra weight only exacerbates the problem.

Also, mares are so much more relaxed and settled if they are introduced back to the mob as soon as possible as they would do in the wild. Often mares become over-protective (foal proud) when it’s been weeks since they have had to congregate with a group and this puts the foal under greater pressure (traveling further each day) with the mare constantly on the move to protect her youngster. Another benefit is for the mare post-foaling as they naturally clean up better which improves your chance of a speedy and successful return to the stallion barn.

Another massive positive is that fewer foals congregate in any one area.  The foaling yards remain cleaner and carry an abundance of fresh grass for the next group of newborns which helps control disease.

Amazing how this learning has come from observing horses as nature would have them. A management technique that mother nature has been fine tuning for thousands of years. Who are we to say we know better?

To find out more about Kitchwin Hills, click here

For more information about Duporth click here

For more information about Dane Shadown click here