The tiny filly bounces and bucks rambunctiously around the barn. She’s active and vigorous, running under her mother with room to spare and stopping to lift her head for a few tugs of milk. She’s about six inches shorter than the average foal. And she’s a lucky little girl.
The filly, named Angelina, is one of a pair of twins born April 2 to Paeso, a quarter horse mare owned by Darrell Stortz, who lives west of Emporia.
“You’re getting stronger,” Stortz tells Angelina as he tries to settle her for a photo session. She’s not ready to slow down and she rears on her hind legs and thrashes her front legs to get free. The day before, she’d been easier for Stortz to subdue. However, at a current weight of about 30 pounds, it will be a while before she will be able to escape from the man’s arms.
Stortz had not expected to see double when Paeso gave birth last week. She’d had a sonogram from a veterinarian in Morris County and the second fetus went undetected.
“I came out and checked (Paeso) at 10:30 and she was pacing,” Stortz said of the night the twins were born. “I came out at midnight and she’d already had them.”
One was so small that for a short time, she went unnoticed as she lay among the hay in Paeso’s stall. As the weaker twin, her likelihood of survival was poor and she died within two days.
“This one had the will to live,” he said. “The other one just didn’t have the will to make it.”
The surviving filly, stronger and larger by comparison, also was at risk but now seems to be thriving.
The twins were Paeso’s first birth. Stortz and a friend, who works at a nearby feed lot, had made an arrangement on the breeding. The friend had done some work for the owner of the twins’ sire and had accepted a stud booking as payment for the work. The friend offered to have Paeso bred, with ownership of the foal determined by luck of the draw.
“If she had a stud colt, it would be his,” Stortz said. “If it’s a girl, she’s mine.”
After finding twin fillies in Paeso’s stall, he called his friend saying that the mare had given birth to twins. His friend thought Stortz was joking and said, “And I suppose they’re both girls.”
“I’m serious, because they’re twins and they’re fillies,” Stortz recalled telling him. “He said, ‘Then it’s funnier yet because you’re stuck with them.’”
While twins can be good news in the world of cattle, it is highly undesirable for mares to give birth to twins. Horses are a species that typically experience single births, not doubles.
The odds of having two surviving twin foals are not good, from the time of conception through the birthing process, according to Emporia veterinarian Scott Gordon. Many potential twin foals do not live long enough to be born.
“It’s very uncommon to see twins (born) in horses. There probably are more twins conceived than we would ever know about,” Gordon said. “... A lot of times what happens is if there’s twins conceived sometimes — it’s Mother Nature’s way — one of them will die in the uterus and you just have one viable colt left and that’s the one that makes it to the end of the gestation. ... That’s kind of what Mother Nature intended.”
If both foals do survive, as the long-legged foals grow inside the mare, often “they kind of get intertwined and that makes it a little harder for the mare to deliver them, and that’s a concern.”
Twins generally are much smaller than singles and, because one usually is bigger, the larger foal gets the milk and the smaller one needs to have supplemental milk.
“They’re going to be awfully small and they’re just so weak,” Gordon said. “... It’s mainly just a phenomenon that most horse breeders don’t want to go through.”