Super Sammy the Shire horse to the rescue for two orphan foals

Good things can also come in large packages, as Jess Westwood found out when her SOS call was answered over the weekend. The former trainer and jockey of the likes of the smart chaser Monkerty Tunkerty runs Molland Ridge Stud in Devon, where she offers foaling and rehabilitation services, very much had her hands full with two filly foals who were surviving without their mothers and she had almost given up in the search to find them a foster mare.

Westwood explained: "We didn’t actually foal one of them but a long-standing client, Rosemary Pease, lost her mare who dropped down dead six hours after foaling her Havana Gold filly. She's a very loyal owner and I said I'd be happy to help out. Then we'd had one foal the same day, it was quite a hard assisted delivery and the mother didn’t have any colostrum milk, she wasn’t a very good mother and we had to stand and hold her every hour to let the foal suck.

"We had found a domperidone [induced] mare but she wasn’t producing enough milk either and our Dink foal started losing weight so we had to supplement her with the bottle.

"The foals both ended up together and we started feeding them together. I’d given up hope finding a foster mare because they were bouncing off each other quite well. I didn’t want one finding a foster mare and the other one not - you take them apart and the other one won’t do very well."

Cometh the hour, cometh Sammy, the super-sized heroine of the story.

"On Saturday evening I had a message from a friend saying they knew of a Shire mare that had just lost a foal, it was almost a dream message, if anything could feed a pair of thoroughbred twins, a Shire or a Clydesdale certainly could," Westwood continued.

"She’d sadly lost her foal that day and her owner Cath Pegg very kindly offered her. I got back late on Saturday evening she was a good three and a half hours away, but we put the foals straight on with a vet and she took to them straight away, which was really lucky.

Jess Westwood had to step in to feed the two fillies

"The little Dink foal took a few hours, she’d had a bad mother and didn’t really trust the mare straight away but they’re both really thriving and so is the mare."

Shires were once thought to have a population into the millions and were a familiar working feature of the landscape prior to mechanisation but their numbers dwindled into only a few thousand and these gentle giants are now considered a rare breed.

Westwood has found thoroughbred or cobs to be foster mares in the past but Sammy is certainly a novelty.

"It's really unusual and also at this time of year, they’re not a commercial breed so most hobby breeders would breed in late spring or early summer and for them to have lost a foal at this time has hit us just perfectly," she said. "Also she’s basically had a 100kg foal die, that’s the weight of ours put together so it’s a match made in heaven - they’re going to have as much milk as they want forever!"

Mouse, the filly by Dink, and Tracey, the Havana Gold out of the Honourable Mrs Pease's four-time winner Play Street, already have a bond from their time in isolation and, touch wood, this unusual trio will all benefit each other so that a sad beginning has the happiest of outcomes.

"Thoroughbreds are naturally spicy whereas other horses are normally more sedate and relaxed about life," Westwood said. "Because the mare had only just lost her foal she still had that real maternal instinct, we put her fluids on the foals so she realised they were hers and she's just a super natural mother who is happy to have some children with her.

"The foals had thrived off each other really well, it's always better putting orphans together and they're a very cheeky pair. They went out in the paddock and the foals were cantering around the Shire, I think the mare was thinking, 'My foals don’t normally move that fast!'"

Westwood, who is a Thoroughbred Breeders' Association trustee, is about halfway through foaling an intake of around 35 mares, while Molland Ridge consigns stores at the sales and preparation is already beginning with some of them. Occasionally having to play Tinkerbell is also part of the service.

"I've always done some rehab and foaling on the side and now it’s a full business with a really good small team, it's nice to see some of the foals coming back as three-year-olds and hopefully get sold into some top-class yards, that’s the aim," she explained.

"So far we've done really well as a stud, the foals have all been fine. I do get a phonecall about a problem once a week, I think it's because people know that I can deal with them. I really enjoy looking after the foals and when it’s a challenge, I think it's something I also thrive off."