I am doing a poster report for our middle school science fair this year on foals. I am working on the part about what they can do at each hour and each day after they  are born. I read somewhere that it takes a couple of days for a foal to learn how to go to the bathroom. The book said that when a foal is standing like he wants to go, that’s when he’s learning how to push out the pee and poop. My mother thought that sounded silly. She has always thought that sort of behavior just happens without any learning. She thinks that if they push a lot trying to poop, it’s because the first poop is hard and sticky. She has never seen a foal have trouble while urinating.

My mom is a small animal veterinarian, and she has loved horses all of her life and has seen some newborn foals. She helped me write this because she thinks you will agree with her and not with what the book said. Kelly

 You are the third or fourth person I know now who read that book and inquired whether foals really need to learn how to defecate and urinate. So I am going to answer you in the magazine. I think your mom is absolutely right! Urination and defecation in foals (and all newborn animals and baby humans) occur spontaneously. In other words, just as your mom said, no learning is required. In foals, urination and defecation usually occur within the first few hours after birth. If you see a foal pushing to defecate, it is almost always for the exact reason your mom said. The first feces (meconium) is usually pasty, and might require some obvious straining to push it out. Many farms try to make the first defecation easier for their foals by adding a little special liquid (called an enema) to soften the poop (usually called stool) a bit and help flush it out.

For your project, I checked with a veterinarian colleague, Pam Wilkins, DVM, PhD. She is a medicine specialist here in our neonatal intensive care unit at the New Bolton Center. She thought you might be interested to know that the first defecation typically occurs soon after the first nursing, because the nursing stimulates a reflex to initiate movement of materials through the digestive tract. So in most cases that would be within the first couple of hours after birth. The first urination in foals typically occurs within the first six hours for females and the first twelve hours for males. Like defecation, the first urination in foals very often occurs soon after the first nursing. She also agrees with your mom and me that elimination behavior in a neonate is simply automatic, requiring no learning