We recently hit a situation in which we needed to wean a colt at 60 days. I was actually a little nervous about doing this. At 60 days a colt needs a lot of nutrition to keep growing but isn’t really old enough to process normal feed. After a little research, I found out that the best feed to try to get him on would be special milk pellets designed for weaning colts early. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my hands on any of them, and most people I spoke with about weaning this colt were pretty sure it’d be hard to get him to eat the pellets anyway. I ended up purchasing some multi-species milk replacer. This colt drank the milk like crazy from the evening of his weaning. He’d drink about 2-3 gallons every four hours and still want more. He actually gained a bit of weight as I was weaning him and held up to the stresses of it really well. Below is a video I took of him drinking his milk.
Weaning a Colt at 60 Days
August 1st, 2008 · 3 Comments
Tags: Horse Breeding · the Painted Wolf Ranch
3 responses so far ↓
1 Bret Wade // May 11, 2009 at 12:28 pm
It’s allot more work but we baught a milk goat to save on money. It worked out great. The milk replacements got really expensive.
2 admin // May 21, 2009 at 9:48 am
Yeah, we thought about that, but we couldn’t find a goat. Were you able to get the colt to drink directly from the goat or did you have to milk the goat?
3 GarykPatton // Jun 16, 2009 at 9:46 am
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