All knobby knees and bug-eyed curiosity, young GiGi was born just two weeks ago, becoming the newest addition to the herd at Saving Gracie Equine Healing Foundation.
The crazy part is no one knew that her mom, Cheyenne, was even pregnant until a few days before her delivery.
Cheyenne was one of eight horses rescued in December from a kill pen by Saving Gracie’s Founder Barbara Phillips. The horses, nicknamed The Lucky Eight, were estimated 4-month-old babies who had been rounded up off a reservation, likely in Arizona.
The boys were gelded, and the girls were just too young to conceive before then.
So when Cheyenne’s belly swelled as the months went by, Phillips thought “it can’t be.”
“I was on vacation, and I got some texts from the staff here, and they were concerned because they felt like Cheyenne really looked pregnant. My response was, ‘No, that’s not possible. She’s too young,’” she said.
Most horses have their first heat cycle between 1-and-a-half and 2 years old, said Saving Gracie’s full-time Veterinarian Amanda Petty. Even then, that’s young for them to conceive.
“It’s not ideal for them to get pregnant at that age because most horses are not even done growing. So it’s like a teenager having a baby,” Petty said.
As is common with rescued herds of wild horses, Petty and their staff used a more hands-off approach with their care, letting them look after themselves and slowly grow more comfortable with humans.
So it wasn’t until much later that they realized Cheyenne’s body was changing, not just fattening up from her apparent love of food, said Phillips.
“You can see physical changes in the mom when they get closer to giving birth: They kind of soften around their tail head, and their udder fills even more, and the baby drops,” Petty said.
Thinking pregnancy was out of the question, Phillips called a vet up from Salt Lake City to consider a hormonal issue and do some blood work. But he didn’t need to get that far.
“He did a quick exam and was like, ‘Oh yeah, this horse is pregnant. She’s older than we thought … and she’s going to have this baby in 10 days or less,’” Phillips said.
Two days later, Cheyenne birthed GiGi out in the field, like she would have in the wild. Thankfully, Petty didn’t need to intervene.
“Luckily the baby was small and in the right position,” she said. “I feel like sometimes wild horses, or horses that were born wild, are tougher than some of our domestic ones. … So she did well, and she was nursing right away, and the herd seems to have accepted her.”
Horses are typically pregnant for 11 months, Phillips said, putting her conception sometime in October — before she was rounded up off the reservation, before being brought to the kill pen, before Phillips rescued her.
The thought poses a lot of what-ifs.
“If I hadn’t stepped in and saved these eight, GiGi would also have been killed,” Phillips said. “How can we do that? How are we allowing this cruelty happening at these kill pens? … This stuff is happening right now. Babies are being killed.”
Most horses when sent to kill pens, like The Lucky Eight, are tagged for direct shipping across either the Mexico or Canada border, where slaughterhouses process the animals for human consumption. Slaughter of horses was shut down entirely in the United States by 2007, but there is no legislation preventing the process of selling them for transport to countries where the industry still thrives.
Equine rescues and animal activists, like Saving Gracie’s, are urging for a bill designed to prevent the sale of horses for human consumption, called the SAFE Act. The best way to push it through Congress is through petitions and letter writing, Phillips said.
“The more people that do it, if (legislators) are getting hundreds of people, it’s going to make a difference,” she said.
A group of rescues around the country created safeact.org, a platform that streamlines the letter writing process and hopes to turn the expected fall vote favorably.
In the meantime, GiGi continues to grow strong, spunky and curious, looked after by her mother and the rest of the herd. Unlike her family when they first arrived at Gracie’s, she has no fear of humans, no traumas. It’s a clean slate, Petty said.
Now that their team knows some of these horses are older, they’re considering the possibility that another horse may be pregnant, too — Wynonah.
“She’s getting a little bit bigger and wider, and her udder is starting to fill out,” Petty said.
And with GiGi’s arrival, Wynonah has taken on a nanny role, Phillips said, watching over the baby so Cheyenne can rest and eat. Perhaps these are more than her basic, motherly instincts, Petty said.
If she’s pregnant, the latest she would deliver would be in September, so they’re continuing to monitor her progress in the same hands-off approach they had with Cheyenne.
This small herd may be really lucky, indeed.
Learn more about Saving Gracie’s, and how to meet young GiGi, at savinggraciefoundation.org. Follow their instagram @savinggraciefoundation_ for photo and video updates of the baby, too.