Once your pregnant mare has had the heartbeat check, is that it?

[TheFoodtheFadandtheFugly]

Just to be clear - I am not a horse owner, there is no pregnant mare or horse welfare issue. This is from something I read today.

Once the pregnancy is confirmed as stated - is that it for 11 months until the mare's due dates? There would not be further scans or checks of the mare?

It is not an area I know anything about! Perhaps I am thinking too similar to human births where there are check ups. It is because I read about a mare who had a due date, went over, wasn't really showing the proper signs - the vet checked her, there was no foal. She is now believed to have lost the foal early on.

No disrespect intended to anyone, or criticism of any one, I am just wondering.

Really depends on the value of the horse. At a racehorse stud the mares will have much greater care and monitoring than women in the NHS whereas at a small family yard you would prob get a vet to scan to confirm pregnancy (tricky to get them to pee on a stick) and then you would only call the vet again if there was a problem with the birth.
Have worked on both types of yard & generally the mares do better when left to get on with it naturally.
A mare that's had complications, aborted , had a still born or been a poor mum (foal not been able to feed etc) are not covered again.

You can get a (mobile) ultrasound taken.

Depends how much you want to pay. My friend's mare was covered last year and just had a gorgeous foal, out in the field, no other intervention necessary. Sometimes it's best not to over tech these things. Less stressful for the mare. However, some mares in yards in the racing and eventing worlds are micromanaged to the nth degree for best outcomes so it all depends on the horse, their owner and the set up.

Scan usually at 14 days and check for pregnancy and twins - one will always be pinched if twins present. Then other scans are possible but we don't bother unless we have concerns. We check for early bagging up or discharge. Then the day following the birth I like the vet to come and check the foal over providing there's been no emergency during foaling. We may do an antibodies test if there's any concerns about how much colostrum the foals had and this is done 16+ hours after birth. We've just had a foal that had a text book delivery and fantastic mare but the foal just didn't latch and had to be tubed. So the mare had to be milked so the foal could have the colostrum and we had to do this twice before the foal latched.

We've always done 14, 28 and 45 day scans. You can normally tell if things are progressing normally - although harder to tell in a maiden mare, as the one you're talking about is (Bear, I assume?).

Where I worked, we used to scan the same as above, maybe skipping the 45 day scan for the tiny ponies (Welsh breeder).

It's pretty unlucky for the mare to reabsorb the foetus but it does happen. If they didn't foal around the expected date, we'd get the vet to palp then and rescan if advised.

If this is EEP's then they've been really unlucky.

Just realised that I only partially answered your question - there's normally no scans past day 45 for "normal" brood mares. The top sporthorse and race broodiesay get scanned more, and are more likely to be closely observed more of the time (cameras, kept in more rather than being out in the field) so if an abortion happens it's more likely to be spotted.