Thursday, August 24, 2006

Holy Cow!

One of those minor set backs, but very telling.

Since Lutine was looking so sound and happy, I decided to start trying to walk her out on the lanes for 10 minutes a day, without boots, as the smooth tarmac is a good surface for building strong hooves.

Luckily my husband came with me the first time we tried to walk past the neighbouring farm. Lutine doesn't 'do' cows! Ho my Lordy! Anyone would think they were horse-eating space monsters. She was dancing about, she leapt over a ditch at one point and, even worse, I found out that Lutine likes to come over the top of the puny people leading her when she gets worried about something - a bit like when Scooby Doo dives into Shaggy's arms... but with a 16.3hh (167cm) horse, it's not funny! So, I quickly realised some schooling effort had to go into Lutine before we recommenced the handwalking.

However, all the blasting about and silliness on the tarmac had left its mark. It must have reignited some inflammation and Lutine started head bobbing slightly in trot again out in the field. :-/ This head bobbing lasted about 5 days and then gradually disappeared until after about 8 days, she was no longer doing it. I was glad it hadn't lasted longer than 8 days. Hopefully, as she gets stronger and sounder, these episodes will require more strain before it has an effect and will heal more quickly until she's about the same as the other horses.

When I think about it, the things that frighten her vs the things she's sanguine about are a rather poignant reflection of her life so far. She absolutely does not mind: travelling in a trailer (she's seen a lot of vet hospitals in her life), having injections, having the vet examine her, being stabled, eating medication, having her feet looked at. She FREAKS about common-or-garden items around the countryside such as cows, bits of farm equipment, little yappy dogs, flappy washing lines. My other horses are pretty much the opposite in terms of what they're used to.

A friend and I rode out with two of my other horses plus Lutine on the lead rein the other day though, and she was much better with the cows so long as she could 'hide' in between the other horses.

Sound on the 20m circle

This was one of those lovely surprises you sometimes get along the 'road to barefooted soundness'. When I'd first got Lutine, someone had advised me to have some standardised 'tests' that I could use to chart her progress. One of the tests I had was Lutine trotting a 20m circle in our sand-based round pen. In the early months of January, February and March, she was definitely head-bobbing lame on the 20m circle. I'd stopped doing this test because, for a start, the circle puts extra strain on the joints and I was trying to get rid of inflammation, and because it used to depress me watching her head bob!

One breezy evening in July, I'd put her in the round pen to eat her food and she decided she was fed up of being in there, plus she was feeling scatty owing to the breezy conditions. When I looked over to see if she'd eaten up her dinner, she was prancing around the round pen looking very sound. I went and got my lunge whip so I could direct this movement a little more effectively and asked my husband to take some video tape.

Well, being 'lunged' in the round pen was very exciting for Lutine! She was bowling along at the trot and breaking into canter, on both reins. No sign of the head bobbing! And, to top it off, she insisted on jumping over a small group of poles laid on the floor every time she went round, even though stepping over them was perfectly feasible.

Sound on the 20m circle and happy to take canter on both reins! Yeehah!

I do have video footage and one day, when I work out how to edit it and upload it to the Net, I will put it up on the blog for people to look at.

EPSM: Another piece of the puzzle


Obviously, when Lutine arrived she was very thin and wasted but even though she put on weight quickly with a proper diet, she still lacked muscle development. On top of that, she sometimes used to do this weird thing where she hiked up her back legs as though she had a cramp. She would snatch them up and wave them in the air uncomfortably until stamping them down. I used to watch her do this and think 'hmmm, what IS that about?'. Anyway, by chance I was reading about a condition known as EPSM on the internet one day, as you do, and lo! they could have been describing my horse to a T. I read several articles concerning EPSM from the ruralheritage.com website, written by Dr Beth Valentine, an American veterinary pathologist and they seemed very relevant so I emailed Dr Beth with Lutine's story, her symptoms and photos. Dr Beth's comment was that EPSM was a 'strong possibility' for her and that a diet change could help. EPSM can only be confirmed by muscle biopsy, which I will have done later in the year when there are less insects about, and in the meantime the dietary changes were simple to make and not dangerous.

EPSM stands for Equine Polysaccharide Storage Myopathy and it's basically a metabolic condition where horses can't use energy in the form of muscle glycogen (I think that's the right way to describe it). What it means in practical terms is that Lutine shouldn't be fed cereals and starches/sugars and she needs to get at least 25% of her calorific intake per day from oil, with the rest from fibre- or protein-based sources. Dr Beth thinks that EPSM may have come about as we've bred more and more high-performance horses; I've spoken to several different equine nutritionists who think it can actually be caused by inappropriate diet, high in cereals, leading to mineral deficiencies and damaged gut walls. Either explanation could fit to Lutine.

In any event, we started her on the high oil diet and she has gone from strength to strength, literally. I've also now just started her on a feed balancer by a company called Top Spec (www.topspec.com) plus their 10:10 Joint Support supplement. When I spoke to Nicola Tyler, Top Spec's senior nutritionists, she explained how high cereal diets acidify the horse's hind gut and lead to the gut walls becoming more permeable. This allows undesirable toxins though in to the bloodstream, which can negatively effect the horse's system in all kinds of ways. On top of that, by not having the necessary minerals and trace elements in such an unbalanced diet, Lutine's cells did not have the necessary tools for correct metabolism and in itself this could create the inability to use muscle glycogen, inappropriate glycogen storage in the muscles etc. The food I am giving her now gives her optimum levels of all vitamins and minerals for cell metabolism, plus a hi-tech yeast and another ingredient called a mannan oligosaccharide (MOS) both of which help to restore and maintain gut health. Nicola thinks there's a possibility that Lutine's gut will heal in time, though it may not. However, I think we're on top of this issue now.
She's looking extremely well these days compared to how she looked in the photo above but I'm hoping for even better! (p.s. sorry for weird paint effect on photo. Something must have gone wrong during upload but you can still see how wasted Lutine's muscles were.)

May Was Difficult


Everything was going great until May time. We had a big thunderstorm and I was watching the horses dashing about in the paddock, all excited about the rain and wind, with Lutine prancing about on the soft ground. The next morning my husband went out to check on the horses and when he came back inside, he said 'was Lutine's really lame yesterday evening?' 'No', I replied. Well, she is now....

Lutine was hopping lame on her off fore. I checked it over and couldn't find any obvious injuries and given the previous evening's high jinks, the likely candidates were a stone bruise or a tendon/soft tissue injury. It could even have been an abscess starting up because of the sudden wet weather. So, I isolated her from the other horses so they couldn't bully her while she was unable to move out of their way. I put her in our sand-based round pen with hay and water, then started cold hosing the leg in case it was a soft tissue injury plus gave her homeopathic Arnica. She was horrendously lame when doing turns and was very sore on a straight line plus she had digital pulses on both front feet. I actually started to think it was the dreaded laminitis come to visit...

She improved daily for a few days but I still called in the vet to ensure there wasn't a serious mechanical problem. The vet diagnosed a stone bruise, most probably got when she was hooning about during the storm, so I carried on with arnica. During the day, she would go out in her boots with pads in the bottom (field was dry and hard again by this time) and into the sand round pen on a soft surface overnight. The main thing was to prevent further traumatic damage and inflammation to her foot. Then, we went through 3 cycles of her coming sound over 3 to 4 days and then going hopping lame again for another 3 or 4 days, which is very indicative of a grumbling abscess. The vet had warned any haematoma might abscess so I wasn't entirely surprised. At the beginning of the 3rd cycle, I called Ainsworths homeopathic pharmacy in London who sent me an individualised remedy for the suspected abscess. After 3 doses, she went sound and stayed sound. In all that time, even though I'd done hot poulticing to try and draw any abscess that might have been forming, I'd not seen any pus drain out of the hoof. However, about 5 weeks later, I was trimming her hoof and lo and behold, a long, thin sub-solar cavity revealed itself as it shed itself out. The abscess had been near her toe in a long, thin cavity and had completely reabsorbed, as shown in the photo above.