This feature was videotaped at a horse and hay farm that adjoins the back end of the Rancho Ontelaunee property.  The physical setup of this farm is ideal for the raising of a horse in the manner of 24/7 year round outdoor living. 

A natural horsekeeping note of possible interest, pertains to now deleted scenes in the original DVD feature (see 4th paragraph's explanation), showing the foal being bottle fed milk, when only a few hours old.  The reason for this was that the mare had begun lactating to a considerable extent, well in advance of the actual foaling.  And, so, this 'early mare's milk' was saved, as it contained the protein rich colustrum that is believed to be essential to a foal's healthy start in life.  An interesting observation that we have heard about, which attempts to explain why such early lactating occurs in some mares, of outlined in the following paragraph.

This basic explanation is that, as a mare gets ready for foaling, a part of her natural instinct kicks in full force, where she behaves like a wild horse, looking for a safe place that is hidden from predator animals, to have her foal.  Even in many fully domesticated  mares, this instinct becomes so strong that humans are regarded as predator animals (which they  ARE, by nature).  And, the mare instinctively looks for a safe and hopefully concealed place to have her foal, away from human onlookers.  This is believed to be especially true of mares who are used to living outdoors all the time.  But, in many cases, the humans decide it would be a good idea to bring the usually living outdoors mare into a barn stall, where they can keep an eye on her.  And, when this happens, the mare's natural fear instincts cause her to feel threatened by the confinement and increased human presence, with the result that she mentally holds off on the birth process for as long as seems possible for her, while other, purely physical functions, such as lactating, go ahead on schedule.  

This feature, overall, as specially edited for display on this web site, is a succession of excerpted scenes from an orginal DVD production of about one-half hour, that was produced strinctly as a somewhat elaborately produced video souvenier for the owner of the photographed horses, with a resulting loss of most of the originally used, copyrighted music soundtrack (which had to be replaced with "free play" music) and an unfortunate, related loss of several lengthy, "sidebar" sequences, which had added certain elements of humor and tenderness, but needed to be excluded here, in consideration of the required downloading time for this still large data file sized video.  Even the original opening and closing material had to be mostly deleted, due to data size problems.  This deleted material included an an screen text introduction of the first scene which read as follows:

In the very eary morning of March 22, 2003, at Maiden Springs Farm in Berks County, PA,

the miracle of birth takes place once again,

as an Arabian mare named Kharbon produces a foal.

  The newborn horse is a filly and soon will be named "Juniata", or "Juni" for short.

In less than three hours after birth, another miracle occurs in the  world of horses.

It is far beyond any similar achievement in the early life of humans.

And, for one so young and new to the world, it is a hard fought, personal triumph."

( Feature Running time:  12:50 )

MEDIUM Screen Size

LARGE Screen Size

The MEDIUM SCREEN video is, noticeably, not as high in frame rate and resolution as the large screen selection.   This results from keeping the video data size to about one half that of the large screen version, in hopes of making it practicable for viewing on accelerated computer-internet configurations that are faster than dial-up, although not as fast as high speed broadband, which is recommended for the LARGE SCREEN selection.