vet Archives | Rochester Trail Riders

Today turned out to be rather eventful one on the farm.

6am: With the weather being cold and crappy I ended up turning out Fay and Goliath in their rain sheets last night. This morning when I went out to give them breakfast I noticed Goliath had made a mess of his sheet. It was practically under his belly and one of the leg straps was wrapped around his hind fetlock. He didn’t appear to be in any distress and stood quietly as I took the blanket off him. I call him a goofball and fed him his breakfast.

7am: On my way down the driveway as I headed off to work the big guy decided to take a nap next to Cotton and the foal. I remember thinking how cute it was so I snapped this photo.

9am: I get a call from my husband who too was heading down the driveway to work and noticed that Goliath was still down and this time none of the other horses was near him. He was all alone and didn’t even react to the car coming down the driveway. M decided to get out of the car and walk over to the fence to check him out closer. Still, Goliath didn’t so much as blink or lift his head. Thanks to the wet ground and rain Goliath was also shivering.

At this point I got the phone call I advised him to do all he could to get Goliath up and I’d call the vet and head back home.

10am: Driving like a mad woman I made it home in record time. Sure enough Goliath was still down and had that glassy eyed look of lost hope. With M’s help I pulled out his front legs and we rocked him as hard as we could to get him up on his chest. At that point the old boy made the effort to actually stand up! Yippy!

I had M walk him around while I ran to get a thermometer and some blankets. This is when it’s good to know your horse’s “normal” temperature. Goliath’s temp usually hangs around 99.9 to 100 so when I got a reading of 98.3 I was pretty concerned and relieved at the same time. At least it wasn’t a fever but disconcerting knowing my poor boy was very cold.

barley — Barn cat, Barley as a back warmer.

The vet showed up a short time later and did a full physical and thankfully he wasn’t colicing. The vet says it was just a case of “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” Literally he got down, didn’t have the strength or the will to get back up and just “gave up.” Thanks to mother nature being such a PITA he got soaked to the bone and caught hypothermia.

So for today Goliath is covered in blankets and is in a stall to keep him dry so he can warm back up. We’re also taking turns walking him up and down the driveway every 1-2 hours so his fatigued muscles don’t seize up on him again.

WebCamPic — Keeping a close eye with a barn camera.

Summary:

Here’s what we think happened. After finding a freshly made mud pit in the pasture I concluded that Goliath probably rolled, got a leg caught in his blanket somehow and proceeded to totally freak out wasting all of his energy trying to free himself from his blanket.

When I found him in the morning and freed him of the blanket he finally could relax and laid down for a nap. However, when it came time to stand back up, his muscles were weak from the struggle the night before and he literally couldn’t get back up. He literally gave up trying and just lay there. If it wasn’t for the fact my husband had enough horse sense to stop and check him out we very possibly could have come to a very sick or possibly dead horse.

February 26^th 2007 a date which will forever be stuck in my mind. Why? That was the day I had to make the awful decision to euthanize my mare Hobbie. Here’s our story on how we got to that point and what planning had to be one.

Mahaba Ghinwa (Hobbie) was a purebred Egyptian Arabian mare who unfortunately found herself unwanted by her previous owner and was abandoned at the farm where I worked, bored unpaid. On January 1^st 2006 I paid off her back board and brought her home to my farm. What a great little mare, she was only used as a brood and had little handling. I worked with her and taught her to ride and drive and she soon became a favorite. So much so she was my mount on our wedding day that October.

Unfortunately 1 year to the day disaster struck. I remember it all too well. January 1^st 2007 was an seasonably warm day and the ground was bare and dy. I decided to let the horses out into the big field to stretch their legs since they have been stuck in the mud paddock for a few weeks. I watched them run, buck, kick up for a while and then they all settled in and munched on some grass so I went about my day.

4pm that evening I rang our dinner “cow bell” and waited for the thundering hooves that usually followed but not this night, I only got one horse who sauntered up. Stepping out into the paddock I could see Hobbie out in the field, ears pricked forward and she whinnied out for me. I called to her and she bobbed her head up and down and whinnied again. I knew something was wrong and made my way out to her.

As I grew closer I could see there was a problem. Her left knee was the size of a soccer ball and she couldn’t move. I tried to tempt her forward to get her back to the barn but she wouldn’t budge and I couldn’t blame her. I called the vet and remained as calm as I could, explaining what I saw.

The vet was only 20 minutes away but it felt like an eternity. I had been in this position before and after much crying and tears I had actually come to the decision to put her down. The vet however had different plans.

The vet drugged her, applied a split and we managed to get her back to the barn. Xrays were taken, ice applied and wraps. Not much to do now than sit and wait.

The xrays showed she blew out her knee alright and there wasn’t much holding it together any more, there were even small fractures of bone floating around from the trauma. The vet convinced me to hold off making an official decision until we heard back from Dr. Dean Richardson. Does that name sound familiar? It should. He was Barbaro’s surgeon. Unfortunately, this all happened while he was working on Barbaro and his reply back was delayed because of it.

His reply came about the same time a major turning even occurred that sealed my mind. Poor Hobbie finally told me the only way she knew how that she didn’t want to be stuck motionless for the rest of her life. While I was mucking out her stall she made a break for it, jumped a gate and ended up belly deep in snow before the pain became so great her body shut down and she couldn’t move any more. She just stood there, buried in snow shaking from the pain of her ordeal. I managed to get her back inside, gave her some pain medication and called both my husband and the vet. Today was the day, I couldn’t take it emotionally anymore and keeping her confined to a stall in such pain was not fair to her.

But now what? It’s February, the ground is frozen and there’s 2 feet of snow to dig through. At the time we didn’t have the equipment to bury a horse on our own.

I talked to the vet and there were 3 options;

Hire a backhoe to come to us and bury her on our property
Trailer her to a crematorium
1. Cornell does “group” cremations of “whole” animals
2. Rush Pet Cemetery will cremate your horse in “pieces” because their crematorium isn’t large enough for a whole animal
Have her buried in a pet cemetery like the one in Rush

#1 didn’t work because we had not lived on our property long enough to know where we could bury a horse not to affect our water supply. Cremation was expensive and Cornell was quite a drive and I didn’t like the idea of chopping her up to accommodate a smaller crematorium.

That left working with Rush Pet Cemetery to have her buried there. What nice people. They made a very hard time as stress free as it could be and best of all it was affordable.

We loaded Hobbie up in the trailer and opted to meet the vet at the cemetery. I won’t bother you with the details but there was much crying, hugs and saying goodbye.

It was the longest ride home with an empty trailer and to this day I still can cry at the thought of her. She was a great horse and I will miss my little Hob Gobblin.

What caused her busted knee? No clue, I walked every inch of that field and there’s not so much as a divit or rock. She just must have stepped wrong.

Trail Tails
The Tuesday Horse Blog Linky

Promote Your Horse Blog
Sharing Your Blog Link

Please use your FULL perma-link URL not just your blog domain name.

Example Bad: http://www.RochesterTrailRiders.com
Example Good: http://www.rochestertrailriders.com/2010/12/winter-fun-with-horses/

Pay it back! All we ask is that you pay it back and place either a link back to RTR in your post or use the following button in your post.

Please comment and remember to leave comments on other folks pages too! Everyone loves feedback.

Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets — Auto-Linky widget will appear right here!
This preview will disappear when the widget is displayed on your site.
For best results, use HTML mode to edit this section of the post.

Tag: vet

Do you know when your horse is in distress?

Trail Tails: Saying Goodbye

Trail Tails
The Tuesday Horse Blog Linky

Trail Tails The Tuesday Horse Blog Linky

Trail Tails
The Tuesday Horse Blog Linky