All of our foals are
imprinted at birth by the method used in the
book from Western
Horseman Books entitled "Imprint Training of the Newborn Foal"
You can order your copy from the above link.
by Robert M. Miller, D.V.M.
For fewer complications we
wean and castrate our foals by the moon signs and below is a chart of the best
dates for weaning and castration. Hope you find it useful! If you'd like to know
how the sign works click here.
The following article is from the
Western Horseman a back issue we had from 1992 this explains how "The
Sign" works for those of you who wish to learn how to figure the dates
yourself. Weaning by "The Sign"
"We wean by The Sign if it's convenient.
Many of the farmhands feel better if we do it that way. I guess it's just
like walking under stepladder--you may say that you're not superstitious, but
you'd just as soon not go under it."
Those comments, made almost 30 years ago by Preston Madden,
owner of historic Hamburg Place in central Kentucky, at the time represented a
felling prevalent among a sizable number of horsemen that "The Sign"
is one thing that should be considered in deciding when to wean a foal.
Many horsemen still fell that way, and even the farm managers who won't admit to
believing in the theory might steal a glance at a Farmer's Almanac as weaning
time approaches in the fall.
But what is "The Sign"? And how does a mare owner
decipher those odd-looking zodiac symbols in the almanac if he wants to be
certain "The Sign" is "right" for weaning?
The fundamental principle of astrology is that the moon, sun,
planets, and stars somehow are able to exert an influence on events in our
everyday lives here on earth. How this might happen is anybody's guess,
but proponents of the pseudoscience are certain that it does happen, and farm
managers who wean by "The Sign" usually have substantial anecdotal
evidence; they remember entire foal crops weaned by "The Sign" that
turned out well, and individuals weaned when "The Sign" was
"wrong" that had nothing but problems.
Valid or not, this is how weaning by "The
Sign" works:
It takes the moon a little less than 28 days to
complete on orbit around the earth, and on any given night during that lunar
cycle, the moon appears to be near on of a dozen groups of fixed stars, or
constellations. These are the same constellations that make up the 12
signs of the zodiac familiar to anyone who ever has read a horoscope --Pisces,
Aries, Taurus, and so on.
Two thousand years ago, astrologers assigned each sign of the
zodiac to a part of the body. Every 28 days or so, as the moon moves from
on constellation to the next, it also moves progressively from one part of the
body to another, from the head (Aries), to the neck (Taurus), the arms (Gemini),
the breast (Cancer), the heart (Leo), the bowels (Virgo), the kidneys (Libra,
the loins (Scorpio), the thighs (Sagittarius), the knees (Capricorn), the legs
(Aquarius), the feet (Pisces).
The idea is to wait until the moon has moved to a sign (or
part of the body) that is below the part of the body you are working on.
The thinking gets a little fuzzy here, but the theory says that since you are
weaning a foal's body (apparently without his lower legs) it is best to wait
until the moon--and therefore "The Sign"-- is below the knee. To
do this, locate a calendar for the month in question, find the little diagrams,
representing the signs below the knee (Aquarius for the legs and Pisces for the
feet), then locate those two signs on the calendar.
The calendar will indicate on which days of the month the
mood enters those two signs (although theses dates will differ slightly from the
almanac). Weaning supposedly can be done safely on the days when the
moon is "in" Aquarius and Pisces.
This works out to a 4-day window for "safe" weaning
each month, ending when the moon chugs back up to Aries, sign for the head.
The actual dates vary from month to month because of the variance between the
moon's regular 28-day cycle and the calendar's 28-day to 31-day months.
The effectiveness of weaning by "The Sign" never
can be confirmed. So even though weaning by "The Sign" might not
help it probably will not hurt, either.
Free-Rein-Designs.com 
"The Sign"
