Calculation of Due Date

[Bondama]

The first of my five preggos looks like she's about to burst! She was pasture bred and exposed to the stud on 12/20/05 and thereafter. They all live together in one happy family. She is the alpha mare and I guess that means she got hers first! Any event, I am trying to calculate her approximate due date. Would I add 340 days to 12/20/05? or do I approximate it over a 2 or 3-week period? Not real sure I can even get an exact date, but maybe a window. Any ideas?

The mare is Diplomatic Pleasure, a What a Pleasure granddaughter and she's in this database. She is a very lovely, big thick RED chestnut with lots of roaning on her flanks and sides, a very large star and belly spots (sabino) and white tailhead (rabicano). Pleasure is bred to our AQHA perlino stallion for what I hope will be a very flashy dilute appendix foal, either palomino or buckskin.

Here's a link to her photo album on Webshots if anyone's curious.

[url][URL=http://pets.webshots.com/album/549824081jJxtMG][/url][/url]

[Roguelet]

I have this nifty little equine breeders wheel thing, and if you use 12/20 as the LBD, your "window" is November 15 - December 5, with the "due date" being November 25. Of course, we all know mares certainly don't always do what they're supposed to do...

Anyway, that would be the earliest, since that was when the mare was first exposed, but the real due date would likely be some time after that, depending on when she was acutally bred.

Our vet's ultrasound will actually measure the size of the fetus and calculate the days... it uses average size, but it's always been within one or two days of the actual last cover date on our mares, so it's pretty darn accurate.

[Bondama]

Wow, thank you Roguelet! Eeek, so like over the next two weeks, I should start watching her for bagging up / waxing, etc. I'm so excited - it's our very first foal!

Thanks again!

[majxmom]

I always use "Twenty days short of a year." It seems to work better than anything else I've seen. So if your mare was bred April 20, 2006, expect her to foal April 1, 2007.

[Bondama]

Thanks guys.....but this mare slipped on Nov. 6th.

I posted another thread called Sad News which has details.

[ZiaLand]

Bondama, so sorry to hear that. Very sad. It's even harder when it's one of your first foals. Hopefully the bad luck is out of the way for a few years.

Laurie

[madelyn]

Aargh... don't you hate when that happens?

I'm in that "if I knew then what I know now" stage of things...and one of the causes of late term abortion (specifically around the 10 month timeframe) is placentitis. According to the information I've been able to glean, symptoms are early bagging up, and sometimes fluid dripping from the vulva. It may be stopped with a quick course of antibiotics. Sometimes by the time it is diagnosed it is too late, but it is never a bad thing to check all of your mares carefully a couple of times a week for things like that.