What Your Horse Does All Day

I’ve heard from the cat version of the dark web that some of you are suddenly home way, way too much during the day. I hear some virus is responsible. Let me tell you, the cats aren’t happy about it, and we’d like things to go back the way they were very soon. Those of you at home have also been watching your horses a lot more. You’re noticing things you’ve never noticed before. This week I’m going to help you determine if those behaviors you’re suddenly aware of after watching your horse for 8 hours while pretending to work from home are worth a call to one of my Docs, or if it’s no big deal.

Sleeping

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: us pets, small and large, spend a large portion of our time sleeping. In the wild, your horse would have to spend a large portion of the day trying to eat enough crappy, tough, dry grass to meet their nutritional needs. You have given them at least two square meals daily of delectable, nutritious concentrates, along with plenty of hay. While that hay is dried grass, it is of delicious varieties which were specially cultivated, and fertilized to provide optimum nutrition to the equine athlete. All that means your horse can spend most of the day sleeping under the thoughtfully provided fans, in their comfy stall, or in that perfect wallow they’ve made in the sandy area.
By now you’ve spent several days, at the very least, watching your horse’s patterns. As long as nap time happens around the same time every day, and involves snoozing either in sternal (the fancy word for sitting-up sleeping), or lateral (the fancy word for laying flat out) recumbency (the fancy word for laying down), then things are good. You may continue to “work” from home.
You will also notice normal nap time involves sleeping, then waking up, then moving on about one’s day. This is true for cats as well. If your horse is getting up, laying back down, getting up, laying down, and never truly sleeping, or getting on about their other daily chores, then it’s definitely time to call my Docs. Even better, send a video of the behavior to them via Medici. See last week’s blog if you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say Medici.
Repeated rolling, without a good shake upon standing, is also a reason to call the Docs. As is laying around at inappropriate times and locations. You may have noticed your horse is particular not only about what time naps occur, but also where. Changes to these behaviors are often early signs of colic. Definitely a reason to call the Docs!!

Standing around

Since you humans have provided all a horse could want, you may also notice them standing around an awful lot of the time. Much like napping, this often has a prefered location, especially if your horse is in a stall. While pretending to attend that Zoom meeting, you may be watching the camera on your horse. Take this opportunity to really notice how they stand around. Horses just hanging out will generally have one hind foot resting, with the opposite front foot popped forward a little bit. This keeps them stable, but allows that hind leg to really rest. Most horses will have a preferred hind resting leg, but will also switch legs periodically. There’s no hard and fast number here, but if your horse is constantly (think every few minutes) switching up the resting hind leg, there’s a good chance they have some level of lameness or soreness going on somewhere from the low back to the hind feet. If the opposite front foot is pushed more than about 6” in front of the other front foot, there’s a very good possibility that foot hurts.
Other clues to look for that can indicate pain, are resting against a wall, and piling footing underneath their feet. Horses will rest an entire side against a wall, or push their hips into a wall to help hold themselves up. A huge indicator of painful feet is stacked bedding underneath a portion of the foot. The most common way my Docs see this is pushing bedding into a hill that the horse then props their heels up on. By doing this, your horse has created their very own wedge shoe!

Eating, Drinking, Pooping, Peeing

These are the first four questions I often hear when my Docs are evaluating sick horses. Are they eating normally? Drinking the same amount? More? Less? Pooping as usual? And how’s that urine? Same color? Opacity? Quantity? These seemingly simple questions are huge clues about your horse’s basic well being. Now is the time to get a really good handle on how your horse normally goes about these normal daily tasks. Is the hay all scarfed down quickly? Or is your horse more of a savor-every-morsel kinda guy? How about drinking? A few visits to the water trough for a deep drink? Or more of a drive by sipper every time a cloud passes the sun? Get a handle on the details of the Big Four Questions, and you will be able to spot health concerns for your horse way, way before they become a big problem.

Many of you humans are looking at this stay-at-home thing all wrong. It’s not isolation, it’s a chance to understand a day in the life of your animals on an unprecedented level. This information can help you pick up on subtle clues about lameness, GI health, and more! As the official cat representative, I do ask that you keep these deep observational dives to the non-feline species. We cats would prefer to nap in peace!

Until next week,
~Tony

PS ~Looking for fun things to do while keeping your distance? Springhill Equine has a ton of videos on our YouTube channel. Catch up on all those seminars you’ve missed. Our website has every blog yours truly has ever written. You can get sucked down a rabbit hole of information there. Need more? Check out Springhill Equine’s podcast: Straight From The Horse Doctor’s Mouth. And maintain your distance!!

Tuesdays with Tony

You may have noticed (or not, if you’re oblivious to the racehorse world like me) that some major bad players were recently indicted by the FBI. That’s right, the Federales were involved. I am above these things you humans call laws, except when it comes to Rabies shots, but I understand some pretty big laws were broken. More importantly, horses were hurt, and potentially even died because of what happened. I will let you humans sort out the law side of things, but I wanted to chat about science, ethics, and supplements.

What do you want for your horse?

The trainers involved in this indictment obviously don’t want the best for their horses, but what do you want for your horse? I’m okay with saying we pushed hard for the championship. If I wasn’t a cat who’s only motivation is finding the ideal sleeping spot, I’d probably want to push hard for the championship too! You all know horses. You know they understand the game, and many of them like to do what you humans ask of them. Some of them don’t, but that’s a whole different blog topic. However, at the end of the day, it’s up to the humans to understand where the line is between pushing and breaking, and what’s more important: the win, or the horse. I’m not a young kitten, I do understand that the line is in different places for different people. Think about where the line is for you, and your horse. 

What’s in it?

One of the products involved in the FBI raids has an ingredient list that reads as: an innovative formulation consisting of amino acids derived from Ovine Placental Extract. SGF 1000 RMR is manufactured and purified through a patented low temperature process that involves homogenization, fractionation and ultra-filtration of the ovine placental extract suspended in a sterile liquid.

As stated earlier, I’m no kitten, but I am a wise cat. I’ve done my time on the front counter listening to my Docs. That is a bunch of big, sciency sounding words that don’t mean a thing. And nowhere do they have the unabridged version of what’s supposed to happen when they put it in a cold blender, then run it through an expensive strainer. Tony’s Take Home: Be very wary of a company that won’t give you a good answer to 1. The science behind their process, 2. What’s actually in the stuff they’re selling you for what I’m sure is a decent amount of money. This applies to every single thing you humans buy for your horses. From grain, to hay, to probiotics, to saddles, tack, bits, and ANYTHING called a supplement.

There is one particularly overpriced, but very pretty, supplement on the market that is 90% flax seed (!) plus some vitamins and minerals. You can give your horse a pound of flax seed daily, and a pound of a good ration balancer and have the EXACT same thing for about 1/10th the price. Anyway, you and/or my Docs should have a very clear understanding of what’s in any product you are putting in or on your horse. 

What does it do?

In the case of this supplement, it did a lot, and there were statements made like “it doesn’t test,” and “there’s no test for it.” Those seem like red flags to me. Many of these drugs are illegal because, not only do they cause profound performance enhancement, but they also have pretty awful side effects. Mother Nature has done what can be done with the available materials. Racehorses already perform at the edge of what their engineering is capable of. Giving them performance enhancers will only cause the engineering to fail.

That’s exactly what’s suspected in one horse, X Y Jet. One of the nasty side effects is the potential for a heart attack. Well guess who died of a heart attack? That’s right, X Y Jet. Imagine if your tiny human was on that horse when that happened rounding the third barrel and heading for home. I promise you, it’s not a good outcome. Things that promise to vastly improve Mother Nature come with a very, very high price. 

On the other side of the spectrum (and way more common) is the drug that promises to make your barrel horse run faster, your jumper jump higher, and your western pleasure horse to lope slower. Guess what? It very likely doesn’t do ANY of those things! The only thing this type of product, supplement, boot, saddle pad, widget, or thingy is good at is separating your money from your person. Horses are pretty good at that all on their own. You don’t need snake oil to help you. 

Know what makes your horse run faster, jump higher, or lope slower? Good training, hard work, and natural ability. If things aren’t going the way you want, here’s some simple rules:

1. Have my Docs talk with you, watch your horse perform, and do a lameness evaluation
2. Check your tack
3. Check yourself.

I’m not a big fan of rules, but they are important occasionally. So follow the rules, avoid the FBI, and have a happy, healthy horse at the end of the day. 

Until next week,

~Tony

P.S. Looking for more knowledge in the world of horses? Head on over to our podcast page for an abundance of useful knowledge. To get there, just click here. 

Very few things around here are uttered with the same hateful tone as the word sarcoid. My Docs do NOT like this tumor. They feel the same way about sarcoids, as I do about cold, rainy days. I’m lucky. The sun will come out tomorrow. The sarcoid may not go away tomorrow, or the next day, or the year after. Let me share a little Tony wisdom with you about this pesky, not quite cancer, but definitely a tumor, growth that horses get, and veterinarians hate. 

What is it??

Putting on my overly dramatic professorial voice here: sarcoids are a neoplasm of fibroblast cells occurring at the level of the skin in anything equine, to include horses, donkeys, zebras, and all the crazy horse, donkey, zebra crosses that also exist. Now back to regular sarcastic Tony. This means it’s a tumor caused by the cells that give tissue toughness. Blast is science’s way of saying cell, and fibro is what these cells make. They make that tough fiber that keeps skin from tearing, tendons from ripping apart, lungs able to expand without breaking. You get the idea. Neoplasm technically means cancer, but the only good news about sarcoids is they don’t metastasize. That means little bits don’t break off to go form new tumors elsewhere on the body. If you see a horse with multiple sarcoids, each one of those is its own separate little hell creation, not a spawn. 

Why? Oh, Why does my horse have Sarcoids?

It’s a reasonable question for so many of the things horses do, and get. It’s a reasonable question here too, but, as usual, the answer is complicated. There’s a cow wart virus called Bovine Papilloma Virus (BPV) that’s associated with many (but not all) sarcoids. That seems reasonable. I can see how horse skin could be like, eww get this cow wart virus out of here, and make something that looks like the warty, knobby, crusty thing sarcoids tend to look like. However, there’s some of these tumors that don’t have BPV associated with them. Being honest here, it’s a big old “they don’t know”. Here’s another big however: flies are implicated in the spread of BPV to uninfected horses! Need more reasons to have good fly control?? (I’ve written a few great blogs on this along with Dr. Erika Machtinger, known as The Other Erika around here, and there’s a podcast about it over at Straight From the Horse Doctor’s Mouth) One way doctors and scientists have determined flies are involved is the general location for sarcoids in the same areas flies like to hang out on horses. Scientists have also isolated way more BPV-carrying flies around horses with sarcoids than they have around non-sarcoidy horses. In other words, manage your flies. There is also (well, likely, anyway) a genetic predisposition to get more, and worse sarcoids, but this is so far beyond clear that my best answer is wait for more work on this topic. 

The many faces of Sarcoids

This is where the fun starts. Sarcoids can have many, many different appearances, and the approach my Docs take will depend on what that appearance is. Sometimes they can’t even be sure it’s a sarcoid, based on appearance, so they do a biopsy. That biopsy has to go to one of a few equine skin specialists because sarcoids love to look like other things, even when being evaluated under a microscope! 

So what are the sarcoid appearance options? Well there’s occult, verrucose, nodular, fibroblastic, mixed (my personal favorite), and malignant. Very often my Docs will take a wait-and-see approach to the occult and verrucose variety. These sarcoids are known to stay exactly as they are for years and years. They are also known to react poorly to negative stimuli, much like cats. Occult and verrucose also like to play together. They will even combine in one lesion. These guys can usually be described as flat for the most part. Don’t worry, I’ve included pictures for you. 

Nodular are, not surprisingly, nobby, and have intact skin covering them. Fibroblastic are nobby, but with gnarly, warty, not intact skin covering them. Mixed are, well, mixes of the types. And finally, malignant. These guys are super aggressive, spreading, ugly, and very, very invasive. They like to grow on the sides of the face, the groin, and the elbows. 

Pictures

These pictures were rather shamelessly borrowed from one of  Dr. Knottenbelt’s excellent lectures on this topic at the recent American Association of Equine Practitioner’s meeting. 

Die Sarcoid! Die!

Let’s talk about treatments. An important “rule” when it comes to treatments must be discussed here. When there are a whole lot of “treatments” available for a condition, it means science doesn’t have a good handle on the best treatment. It also means a whole lot of those “treatments” don’t do a darn thing, so you best check with one of my Docs before dropping a bunch of money on Dr. Google’s latest trend in sarcoid treatment, only to find out it’s nothing more than repackaged toothpaste. That’s a real example by the way. 

For my Docs, treatments are generally two pronged in some way. Prong one involves removing as much of the tumor as possible. These include surgically removing it, freezing it, heating it, lasering it off, and sometimes even radiation. You know typical evil villain type stuff. Prong two involves getting after the remaining cells with chemicals. This is chemotherapy. There are topical and injectable versions. Choices here are based on location, type of sarcoid, and your horse’s willingness to let you do what needs done. There are also some really great, but very expensive options such as radiation therapy, brachytherapy, and photodynamic light therapy. These are only available at a few specialty hospitals around the world, but offer great ways to kill sarcoid cells in some very sensitive areas like around the eye. 

There’s no way around it, sarcoids suck. Control your flies, and ask my Docs about lumps and bumps early is my very best cat advice.

Until next week,

~Tony

PS – If you would like to learn more about this topic, the humans just did a great podcast on this topic. Click here to learn more.