A lifetime of experience and still learning

A horse we bred, who incidentally carries genes extremely important to us, suffered repeated bouts of colic for more than a year.  Lou had lost half his body weight and was on the brink of a very invasive surgery or the alternative…  actually, I can’t bear to mention the alternative as it was not a pleasant prospect for any of us. Certainly not for Lou, and at the very least would have involved tears and earth works. 

More than a year ago I was a slightly late, no more than 30 minutes, with Lou’s breakfast. When I finally appeared, feed bucket in hand, he began burning around the paddock with excitement. It was winter. It was muddy. He slipped and fell heavily onto one side, immediately jumping to his feet but stood with his hind legs crossed like a ballerina doing a pirouette, obviously an unhappy one.  However, within ten minutes, he was happily eating. Nevertheless this made me realise that he instantly needed to go back to school for entertainment and further training.  The wonderful young woman who had done all work with Lou since a yearling, was busy. Rather than keep the exuberant Lou waiting when he may very well hurt himself, I sent him to a racing stable where he would resume his training.

After a few months he was returned home where a new girl took care of him along with our other horses.  She continued to assure me that Lou was fine and that she was bringing him in each day to remove his covers and groom him.  But eventually I insisted the sulky looking Lou, who had been sifting unhappily around his paddock, was undressed for me to asses every inch of him. A deep abscess on his wither that no one knew a thing about had a thick scab on it which was pulled off with the cover, leaving a perfectly circular gaping hole that Lou would not permit anyone anywhere near to without heavy sedation and our vet teetering on top of a mounting block looking down into the hole, making sincere promises to only look and not touch. 

The vet insisted this completely out of character and incredibly rude behaviour Lou exhibited, was no doubt caused by the overlooked ‘cover rub’  on the point of his wither, which in hindsight is a strange place for a serious cover rub.  The pain was almost too much for Lou to cope with and as we all know this is a very sensitive area. The new girl was dismissed and Lou was given a standard long-acting shot of Exceed LA.  He went without a cover because his memory served him all too well and he could not cope with anything touching his wither. Anything, anywhere near to it was intolerable and would have him, once again, acting like a madman.

He had two further bouts of colic over the next month at home, both of them mild and quickly settling with Buscopan. No stone was unturned.  Lou was wormed and wormed again.  He was given two courses of Ranitidine in case he had stomach ulcers.   The vet determined that his colic was due to stress caused only by the memory of the pain, because the wither had apparently ‘completely healed.’  In a few weeks there was no further colic, and Lou was packed off to school once more to the lovely lady who had always done the work on him prior to his stint at the racing stable. 

But Lou’s behaviour had changed.  He was no longer the Lou this young woman had always known.  He was inexplicably unhappy and uncooperative, refusing to move forward when ridden and often bucking uncharacteristically.  We decided this must be some kind of memory of his cover rub or perhaps a sore back from his previous paddock fall. He was extremely sensitive around his wither and Lou was immediately treated by a specialist equine vet, who scanned and x-rayed both his wither and back. However, nothing wrong was detected.

By now, Lou’s reputation was sullied.  Rather than being the cooperative and calm horse that tried so hard to please and never got upset, he had become a pain in the proverbial and difficult to handle.  This was perplexing and I felt it could only be explained by undetectable damage somewhere in his body maybe due to the initial fall or perhaps it really was bad memories of serious cover rubs.  Whatever the cause for the out of character behaviour, Lou was returned to our farm for further spelling.

Four weeks later and after Lou had two more bouts of colic, things settled.  A young lady expressed interest in him and I suggested she take him as he appeared to now be 100%.  But within no time of being in his new home, he began to colic periodically, each time only mildly but obviously this was not a tolerable situation.   

Lou was transported six hours back to the specialist vet to be admitted into their hospital care and to be even more thoroughly assessed and hopefully diagnosed.  Lou’s wither was scanned and x-rayed again, and again nothing was detected.  However, Lou was scoped both ends and the vet wondered if a slight section of bowel that was inflating slightly more than what was perhaps ideal, after the ingestion of high protein foods, could be causing discomfort enough to trigger a mild colic.  The plan was, if a correct feeding regime did nothing to help this situation, Lou would require highly invasive surgery that had only a reasonable success rate.  But of course the down side would be the expense involved not to mention the stress on a horse that was completely untried and unproven.  What if he did not come right, and where would he go to be taken care of after the surgery.  It was all getting very difficult and, under a cloud of uncertainty, Lou was returned to the young girl and her family where they followed the vet’s feeding and management advice to the letter of the law. They cautiously restricted certain feeds and only allowed an abundance of hay.  

We all got on with life still under the weight of this cloud and hoping beyond hope that Lou’s colic was the result of not a physiological problem requiring surgery but more that he was simply remembering the pain which triggered a mild colic.   The family Lou now resided with, being somewhat overcautious with Lou’s feeding regime, watched as he lost even more weight.  When I returned back to NZ from a trip away, more than a year after this all began, I was advised of further episodes of colic escalating in severity and that Lou was skeletally thin.  I realised this situation could not continue.

I rang a friend for help. It was all I could do to stop myself from howling as I told her Lou’s story and asked if she would please take him, assess him and have the dreaded deed done for us if necessary.  I told her the symptoms beginning with the cover rub.  And she stopped me right there.

“Has he been to a busy yard by any chance prior to this ‘cover rub’?” she asked.

I glugged down my large mouthful of wine a little too quickly and spluttered, “Yes.”

I listened closely.  I learned of this amazingly astute horsewoman’s story that fitted like a glove for Lou and me, and in spite of her warning me that she is not a vet and she couldn’t be sure her suspicions would turn out to be correct or even useful, I knew in my heart that she was 100% bang on and that Lou was going to be fine.  The fall in the paddock was a red herring.  This devastating situation that Lou was in, that had several of our country’s top equine vets scratching their heads for many months and struggling to come up with a diagnosis regarding his colic, was about to be sorted.

Lou was delivered to my friend only a few days after this conversation. He was showing colic signs at the time of delivery. She locked him in a yard for his own safety and the very next day began the treatment she believed in. The reason this event rider is so knowledgeable about this situation is because she also had first-hand experience of it with seven of her horses - too many to believe they all had cover rubs on their withers, all rupturing like boils and leaving circular craters, and all at the same time.  “This to me was not a cover rub epidemic.”

She had insisted the vet swab and test the area of all seven horses, and the results showed both strep and staph bugs were present. The horses were treated with normal pen and gent but the problem soon reappeared.  Exceed helped one horse as it had initially helped Lou, but did not help another horse.  Finally, Marbocyl (unfortunately the priciest antibiotic) was injected daily for seven days and the result - 100% success rate.  All covers and saddle blankets were bleached and scrubbed with hospital grade disinfectants.

These horses had all displayed the exact same symptoms as Lou, and some were so paranoid about their withers being touched they reacted aggressively and became highly stressed. In short, their personalities changed dramatically even though their withers appeared to have healed.

What I would have liked to have understood before Lou’s situation, is that a horse can colic from experiencing pain. Further to this, his wither appeared to have healed but clearly had not. While there was no visible sign of infection in his wither, it must have been brewing and causing significant pain and discomfort. It wasn’t until my friend administered daily injections of antibiotics for a week that this infection was knocked on the head for good and thus, put an end to the (in Lou’s case) life threatening colic.

I’m thrilled to report that after his seven daily injections, Lou is once again digesting all feed types without a single sign of colic.  I think he’s back to being to his old self, and once again would digest old turnips without any issues if he was fed them.