Predicting when a mare will lay down and explosively deliver their foal within 20 minutes takes a lot of practice. However, after looking at hundreds of mares due to foal and spending many nights being fooled, I became good at “guessing” when a mare would lie down and push out their baby.

Because of this, I predicted a mare would foal at Cornell’s Equine Research Park when all the others said, “Not yet.” So, I stayed through the night with my wife and two other undergraduate students. Everyone had left me and at 5 am, alone, I witnessed her lay down and push out her foal. However, the mare delivered the foal under the stall door and into the aisle. Without me being there, I’m sure the mare and foal would have panicked with a bad outcome. But I placed him back into the stall to a gratefully snickering mom.

And this is how “Foal Watch” was started at Cornell.

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