YouTube is filled with amazing, eye-opening, and often strange content. If you allow yourself to fall into the ‘recommended video’ rabbit holes (and, honestly, who hasn’t?!), you’ll be met with a bombardment of random, yet oddly-fascinating topics to select from. It’s not unusual to find everything from transformative beauty tutorials to a multi-millionaire first-grader who makes his cash by playing with toys on camera, to heartwarming gender reveal videos galore, in one list alone.
It’s an erratic assortment of content that can be as perplexing as it can be hypnotic, but if you do, in fact, decide to participate in a session of aimless clicking from time to time, you might just get rewarded with something utterly mind-blowing.
Take today’s video, for instance. It shows the births of two beautiful and healthy twin foals at a farm in Natal Midlands, South Africa. A little background, it’s EXTREMELY rare for horses to carry two foals through an entire term. A vast majority of these pregnancies end in miscarriages, stillbirths, and even death for the mare and/or foals. In fact, experts estimate that the survival rate for both the foals and mare constitutes 1.3% of equine pregnancies.
But, bad odds aside, a horse by the name of Daisy actually ended up pulling off this astonishing feat. Here is more info via Daisy’s handlers:
Treliver D’Aquitaine (aka Daisy) imported from England and by the very successful dressage stallion Treliver Decanter was 7 days over her due date when we were called up to the stables by our night watch saying she was in labour. My husband Guy and I rushed up just in time to help a beautiful palomino colt into the world, we were a bit surprised at his size because Daisy is very big (just under 18hh) but were still thrilled with how beautiful he was.
Our dogs were barking at the house so Guy went down to see what was happening and the afterbirth started coming out but Daisy looked like she was in proper labour again, she lay down a couple of times and was pushing but once the colt was standing she was more interested in him than pushing, I felt inside her and felt two feet, Guy got back to the stables and I told him to pull out the second baby as quickly as possible and with me catching her our hearts stopped watching to see if the second foal would be alive and she was!! She was breathing….
To recap, Daisy’s owners were, of course, just expecting one foal, but after the mare gave birth, they noticed that another one seemed to be coming, too. Talk about a surprise!
Daisy had had a second foal, a cremello filly! She was tiny but strong and a fighter, wanting to stand within minutes and ready to drink once standing. I bottle fed her colostrum from Daisy every two hours in a bottle for the first day and supplemented her milk intake with a bottle until she wouldn’t suckle from the bottle anymore and we could see she was drinking from mom well enough. Now we just had to keep a very close eye on her…. we could see her brother was going to be just fine!
What an unbelievable sight to witness. We’re sure that this must have been a career-high for these South African horse breeders.
Now that you know the background of this amazing birth, it’s time for you to watch the video of the monumental event for yourself.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this viral video. Are you a horse lover? Are you a horse breeder? If so, have you ever witnessed a healthy twin birth?