Whanganui horse breeder Robyn Duxfield can finally put down the bottle ... the one she's been using to feed an orphaned foal every two-and-a-half hours.
The three-week-old horse has been taken on by one of her mares — with a little help from the vet and some hormone injections.
The foal's mother died after just a few days, leaving Miss Duxfield to do the feeding. But, in what is thought to be a New Zealand first, medication and hormone injections have helped get another mare in milk and make her feel she is in labour.
And the orphan now has a new mum.
Miss Duxfield said the technique had never been tried in New Zealand as far as she was aware.
And it worked beautifully. Just 20 minutes after the injections, the mare was sniffing the foal, allowing it to suckle and nickering to tell it to stay close by.
"That's the sound of a mother talking to her foal," vet Malcolm Jansen said. "She's saying, 'You're mine and you ain't going out of my sight'."
Neither Mr Jansen nor his colleague Cayleigh Carter had seen the procedure before, but they said the result was "textbook".
The foal is called Lucky Charm, and it had a difficult birth with the vet having to pull it out of its mother, Longridge Lucky. Unfortunately, the placenta stayed in place and the mother rejected her offspring and had to be sedated to allow it to feed.
The foal needed supplementary feeding because her mother was sick, and she was bottle-fed, day and night.
Vets flushed out the placenta, but Longridge Lucky remained sick with high temperatures. She was lying with the foal when Miss Duxfield went into the house to make up a bottle. When she came out the mare had died, possibly from ongoing internal bleeding.
Miss Duxfield looked online for a foster mother, but found no suitable mares. Then she remembered seeing something on the FoalEd Support Group page in Facebook about a treatment that could make mares act like mothers.
The procedure had been successful in Europe, the United States and Australia, and Mr Jansen from Vets on Carlton agreed to try it.
Palomino mare Longridge Ballerina had had one foal weaned in July, and for 10 days Miss Duxfield gave her an oral drug to make her lactate. Then she injected the mare twice with oxytocin, the "love hormone" to bring the milk on.
On Friday, Lucky Charm had her back coated with a mixture of Ballerina's manure and water to make her smell right.
Ballerina was injected again, with hormone-like prostaglandins, to make her feel as if she was giving birth. Her heart pounded, and she began to sweat copiously.
After about 20 minutes she wandered toward the foal, sniffed its back, nickered and allowed it to suckle. After that she kept it close.
Ballerina was acting just like a mother, Mr Jansen said, otherwise she wouldn't have let the foal come anywhere near her.
"She looks pretty content — her whole reaction was, 'Oh, I think this is mine'."
Miss Duxfield will carry on giving Lucky Charm bottle feeds, until Ballerina's milk is fully in. But she's relieved the treatment worked and she will be able to sleep better soon.
Friends Jenny Benson and Kelly Brider had helped with day feeds, allowing her to keep working at Pacific Helmets in Whanganui, and she was grateful to them, the vets, and to Pacific Helmets for giving her time off work.