I remember 1973 as a bad year. We had three mares foaling, and two had problems. The first mare wasn't producing much milk and also had severe uterine cramps after foaling. We administered pain-relieving drugs and monitored her to make sure she didn't crash down on her new foal. Eventually the crisis passed.

The second mare was not so lucky; her foal presented backward. (During a normal birth a foal faces the back of the mare, with head down and legs stretched out and straight like a diver, but this was not so in our mare's case.) Our veterinarian extracted the foal–dead by then–and discovered the mare had a tear in her uterus; she was later euthanized