The cutest foal photos we could find from 2011!

12/02/2011 3:12pm

We all at WinStar cannot believe how time flies, it is December already and the last of our foals have been weaned.  Weaning is a gradual process that comes at a time of around 6 months for foals when a mother's milk no longer meets their ever growing nutritional requirements.  Sometimes foals are weaned earlier if they have difficult mothers who pick on the youngsters and sometimes later too - we try and cater to each individual as best we can.

Once weaned, the foals are seperated out into groups of up to 10 youngsters that are all of similar age.  For example, the January foals run together, the February foals together and so on.  This is to ensure that older, bigger foals do not bully the younger smaller ones!  As a result, the 'weanlings' have great fun playing and getting up to no good with eachother out in the paddock.  In order to keep everyone in line, at WinStar we have 'nanny mares' of European warmblood origin that are in charge of each weanling paddock and all the babies within!

In under only one month, these weanlings will turn into yearlings as all horses' official Northern Hemispher birthday is January 1st, regardless of the actual day they were born.  We can't believe that in under a month, these babies will be all grown up and in turn, we will begin the foaling season all over again!

In honor of this, we have selected some of the best, funniest and cutest foal photos from this year to share with you.  I hope that you have enjoyed the 2011 season as much as we have and you never know, perhaps one of these little babies is the future Kentucky Derby winner...!