My colt Cloud is a rescue. He had a bad start in life and was stunted. So my vet told me it would be good to wait till he is a year and a half to geld him. He is 8 months today. He has dropped both his balls. I think the fact that I was able to rescue him at 3 months helped because he does not seem to be stunted. My problem is I have a mare. They are seperated now because my Colt was mounting her and chewing on her butt and tail. I really want to geld him now. Is it to soon? And if I do geld him how soon can he be with my mare. My mare has been depressed and lost weight since I seperated them.
So I don't open a new topic, I have a 7-month old mini colt and I don't know when I should geld him. He hasn't expressed any stud-like behavior yet, but I don't know how to tell when he's able to be gelded. In a book I have about breeding and raising, it says to geld in warm weather....?
cloudkisser - I would go ahead and have him gelded now. You'll probably need to keep him and the mare separated for at least a month after gelding.
equiniphile - if his testicles are palpable (i.e. you can feel both) he can be gelded. It is better to geld in cooler weather as there are usually less flies and other bugs.
Equiniphile, if his testicles have dropped, he can be gelded.
No, you don't want to geld a horse in warm weather. It should be done either late fall or early spring, because there are little to no bugs around.
They can't stitch up the area, and it needs to be hosed down several times a day. If the horse were gelded during warm weather, there'd be all sorts of flies and creepy crawlies at his open wound.
Well...Thank you everyone. I just called my vet, hopefully he'll call me back soon. I live in hawaii so I won't be able to take the cold weather advice but I'll talk to my vet and have him show me the best way to keep him clean and the flys off while he recovers.
It does help a horse to grow more when gelded, the growth plates stay open longer. That is why you see halter horse people gelding these babies as soon as their testicles drop, sometimes as young as 6 months, because they will grow alot taller than colts that are not gelded.
I just gelded my colt at 5 months. I'm glad I got it over with!
I've heard people, whom I don't have faith in, say he will be stunted if I gelded early, but everything I have read on the internet says the opposite. Either it won't matter or if anything he will grow taller.
I just wanted to get my guy done because he is a handful already, and I knew with the winter weather being bad, and perhaps not being able to geld him until the end of mud season in late spring, he could already be showing studdy behavior by then. So I chose to jump on the chance to get him done while we had lovely weather in mid December.
He did get an infection and have to go on antibiotics, but that seems to be gone now, and for all intensive purposes, he is completely healed up. So I'm glad I got it out of the way- I was dreading it!
PS. I had the same worries about keeping him in with a mare- in this case his mother. I'm not sure if he would show any interest in her, but I didn't want to wait and find out. Now I can keep them together until spring so they can share the same shelter and everything. Then I can wean when we are out of snow season and I can keep one of them in a corral I have that doesn't have a shelter.
Ask your vet's opinion of course, but I believe, from what I remember from when my friend's colt(s) got gelded, that she had to keep them separate for a couple of weeks before she could put them together again.
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