When Mark and Tina Boulcott agreed to take in some rescued donkeys to add to their menagerie, they thought they were getting four of them.
But it soon appeared that two were pregnant – and one popped out twin foals, within half an hour.
Twins are very rare in donkeys than in horses, and there is a low rate of survival. But Cocoa’s colt and filly, Eddie and Edith, are doing very well at a fortnight old, dentist Dr Boulcott told H&H this week. Both are about the same size as Mocha’s filly Elenor, who was born two days later as a single foal.
“I’m quite a good midwife of horses now!” he said. “We’d been watching the donkeys on cameras for ages, and she looked like a pig on stilts; she was so huge, we thought it must be any time. Then that night, we checked the cameras, and there were two things next to her; it had only been half an hour.
“We rushed out, and saw the two foals, and thought maybe they’d both given birth at the same time.”
But Mocha was still pregnant, and there was only one placenta.
“So obviously it was just one birth, but two donkeys,” Dr Boulcott said.
“We thought ‘Fair enough, we’ve got twins’. Then the vet came the next day, and said ‘Oh my god, you’ve got twin donkeys; I’ve never heard of such a thing’, we didn’t realise the significance of it. He contacted the local paper and it’s gone ballistic.”
The twins’ story has been shared across the internet and social media, and Dr Boulcott said he was surprised by the huge interest.
“But they are cute,” he said. “Technically they’re triplets now, because the other donkey, two days later, gave birth to her single foal. They were best friends, the two mothers; we had to separate them during the birth but now they’re out in the fields in the daytime and all three of them foals are skipping around together, then they come back in and go to their respective stables at night.”
Dr Boulcott explained that his dental practice funds the couple’s menagerie of rescued animals at their 100-acre Bunkers Hill Farm in Pembrokeshire, where Mrs Boulcott also produces Clydesdales with their Oakenfold prefix.
As well as the donkeys, there are 19 horses, six dogs, seven pigs and three cows, not to mention the peacock, and the eight emus – “although the males are sitting on their eggs at the moment so ask me that again in a few days’ time” – Dr Boulcott said.
And what better way could there be to persuade people to visit the dentist, if said dentist has all these animals?
“We write newsletters to our patients; about what you need to do to get clean teeth, and nobody bothers opening it,” Dr Boulcott said. “But when you put a picture of a snowman with a set of dentures, or of the two small sausage dogs that live in the practice, people see it.
“So we talk about the animals, then they engage, and we can add ‘And by the way, clean your teeth’. They’ll open up and engage with the animals, and you have to sneak in the teeth thing. And that’s fine, to be honest. I’d rather write about animals in any case, as teeth are rather boring!”
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