Nov 22, 2016 | Athleticism, Competition Horses, Events, Exercise, Injuries, Safety
Whew, boy am I sore! Kevan Knudsen, personal trainer extraordinaire, had us doing squats, lunges, stretches, and all manner of exercises at our “Exercise for Equestrians” event on Saturday. Technically, I am not an equestrian, so I thought I should have been exempt. But the humans demanded my participation *eye roll.*
Kevan also taught us a great deal about nutrition– one of my least favorite subjects. Turns out lean meats, fruits, and vegetables should make up the majority of your diet if you are a human. Tuna is a lean meat, right? I’m totally in! Your macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) need to be in the right ratio for your body to function properly. Most Americans are eating foods they are intolerant to on a regular basis (dairy, white bread, and artificial sweeteners, for example). Simply eliminating these foods from your diet can result in significant weight loss and better health. As Kevan summed it up, “don’t eat processed crap!”
Of course your mental health is as important as your physical health, especially for riding horses. Horseback riding is one of the only sports requiring the participation of another sentient being. It’s not like running where you can take your frustration out on the track. You need to be in the right frame of mind before you set foot in the saddle. Kevan recommended working on positive self-affirmation, realistic goal-setting, anxiety management, and interpersonal communication. I already practice most of these on a daily basis, in between cat naps.
If you missed me at this enlightening event and would like more information on personal training from someone experienced in working with equestrians, contact Kevan Knudsen at (971) 221-5451, or kevan.knudsen@gmail.com. Your horse will thank you for getting fit and healthy! As for me, I’m just fine with my current lifestyle of eating, sleeping, and occasionally walking out to the end of the driveway. Now to ice these sore quads…
-Tony
Nov 15, 2016 | Cold weather, Colic, Hay
Quick PSA about the Meet Tony Event this weekend: Exercise for Equestrians. You’ve got limited free time; learn how to make the time you do have to exercise count for all that it can! Come dressed to workout and Kevan will help you work on technique. No, he will not be making anyone perform 50 Burpees or anything of that sort. I will, likely, be lying in the aisle watching the goings on since I do NOT exercise.
Anywho, on to my life, which is really what’s important here. Colic. As far as I can tell, it’s what horses do when they are bored and seeking proof that their human is well trained to do their bidding. My Docs, however, tell me it is largely due to the rather ridiculous system horses evolved to digest their food, combined with the rather ridiculous system humans have developed to house and feed said horses. Also, cold weather.
We all know that horses have a crazy GI tract, and we can’t fix that. What we can fix is what you humans do to that GI tract. Start with feeding good stuff. Need help figuring that part out? Contact Beth at the Clinic. She’s an expert. She even has a certificate that says so from a leading feed manufacturer! Between that certificate and over a decade in the feed industry, Beth has answers to your feed questions. Beth tells me forage should form the foundation of the diet. She tells me horses must eat more than the mouthful or so of grass that I eat and then puke up in some inappropriate place. They need to eat 1.5-2% of their body weight in hay every day! From there, supplement the gaps with as little concentrate as possible. Again, Beth is our go to when it comes to nutrition. Got questions? She’s got answers!
Moving on to the most common reason the Docs get called out this time of year: round bales of coastal hay. The weather gets cool, the grass stops growing, and you humans remember that 1.5-2% body weight forage thing and put out a round bale. Horses, being less intelligent than cats, get so excited about the hay, they gorge themselves to oblivion and get an ileal impaction. How do you make sure this doesn’t happen? Start with square bales. Throw out 1 flake twice daily, then 2 flakes twice daily, and keep increasing the quantity until your horse is leaving some of the hay. THEN you can put out the round bale. Also add some peanut or alfalfa hay. I realize most of our horses suffer from too many calories so alfalfa/peanut seems like a bad addition, but luckily adding 3-5 pounds of these hays per day can keep the GI tract moving in the right direction. Other strategies than can help reduce the risk of coastal hay impactions are the addition of very wet, soaked beet pulp or alfalfa cubes (the minis work best) to the diet, and adding salt on very cold nights.
Trust me, my Docs don’t want to see you for a colic any more than you want to see them. Let’s all do our part to keep those horses pooping as they were meant to be pooping!
-Tony
Nov 8, 2016 | Dentals, Events, Foals, Pet Pigs
First of all, don’t forget to get out there and VOTE today! I would, but they have this weird policy against cats voting…
Boy did I have a busy week here at the clinic! First, I had to share my favorite cat bed with a pig named Tank, who was boarding here for the week. Then, early Sunday morning I had to supervise the foaling of a mare with Dr. Lacher, and later help teach her colt to nurse for the first time. He’s lucky he’s cute, because usually I sleep until at least 11 hours on Sundays. Thank goodness we got an “extra hour” with the time change this past weekend, or my delicate sleep schedule would be all out of whack!
The doctors were running all over the area this past week, from Lake City to Ocala. Dr. Lacher stopped by Lynn Palm’s Open House on Saturday to demonstrate our awesome FES machine. If you haven’t tried it on your horse yet, you really have to! At $65 per treatment, it’s way less expensive than a chiropractor, masseuse, joint injections, or other treatments for performance horses. FES has helped dozens of our patients to run faster, jump higher, and move more comfortably than ever before. I have even used it on myself, and let me tell you, it feels awesome.
In addition to lameness exams, foal watch, and routine appointments, Dr. Vurgason and Dr. Lacher treated a nasty, infected corneal ulcer in a horse’s eye. It’s amazing what a difference the right medications, administered effectively, can do for a horse!
I invited almost-Dr. Chloe here for an externship last week, and she was great. She let me in the front door whenever I asked, even if I had just asked to go out 30 seconds prior. She hasn’t decided if she wants to be a horse-vet or a cat-vet yet. Personally, I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t want to be a cat vet…we are all so cute and soft and cuddly! Amongst other things, Chloe helped Dr. Vurgason extract 2 teeth from an aged gelding with a painful condition called Equine Odontoclastic Tooth Resorption and Hypercementosis (EOTRH). Say that 5 times fast! We don’t know why this happens to certain horses, but we know it causes the body to attack its own teeth, dissolving bone in some spots, and thickening the tooth in others. Unlike infections of the molars in the back of the mouth, EOTRH affects the incisors, and often causes horses to go off their feed due to pain. The gelding, Fortune, is able to eat much more comfortably now.
In addition to Tank who was as healthy as, well…a pig, Dr. Vurgason treated 3 sick piglets this week. I like the pig patients, because they usually come to the clinic to see me. Although I must say, they can be pretty loud! There is nothing pigs hate more than being restrained. This makes things like taking a temperature, listening to heart and lung sounds, and giving any medication quite a challenge. With pigs, veterinarians rely heavily on observation and asking their owners questions to determine the correct diagnosis.
Between horses, pigs, and the docs, my managerial duties have been in full force! I think I need a nap. And anyway, with the time change and the days getting shorter, 5:00 feels more like 8:00, which is my bedtime. I’ll catch you cats next week!
-Tony
Nov 1, 2016 | Cold weather, Deworming, Weight loss/gain
Did you miss the last See Tony Opportunity? There’s another coming up on November 19th at 10am. I understand this is a Saturday and that you humans don’t do the thing known as work on that day. That means no excuses for not coming to see me. This will be a talk about exercises and mental strategies that can improve your riding. I don’t know about the exercise portion, but I hear petting a cat while he purrs is an excellent mental calming exercise.
Now on to the main topic for this week: worms. Allow me to digress for a moment; it will make sense in a moment. A funny thing happens around this time of year. First, I notice a change in the weather to excellent catnapping in the sun temperatures, next I notice there is less of the aforementioned sun, and finally one day the humans are all late for their serving duties. This has been explained to me as The Time Change. I feel it’s just an excuse for opening the door and feeding me a full hour late! How does this relate to worms? This Time Change thing coincides with the ideal time to check a fecal parasite egg count on horses. I am a wise cat. I know all sorts of things the average city cat doesn’t.
Worms are smart. Not cat smart, but smart. Over time they have learned how to survive every deworming agent available: that includes the so called “natural” dewormers (more on that later). We humans are responsible for teaching the worms this skill. By using dewormers too often, we let the worms learn how to fight. What’s a horse owner to do? Learn how to use deworming properly by doing three things: 1-Deworm the right horse, 2-Use the right product, 3-Deworm at the right time.
Let’s start with deworming the right horse. The only way to know if your horse has parasites is something called a fecal parasite egg count. This is performed using a small amount of fresh poop. We do some mixing, spinning, and settling before we are able to count how many eggs are left on a microscope slide. This number is our guideline for which horses need deworming now and how often they are likely to need dewormed. These egg counts are often very surprising. Turns out it’s pretty difficult to tell if a horse has worms just by looking at them. Plenty of fat, shiny horses have really high egg counts!
On to the right product. Once upon a time a great idea arose among people who study worms. There were a few products available and they were from different chemical families so it made sense to rotate those products so the worms couldn’t get used to any one drug. Sounds good, makes sense, DOESN’T work. The worms are pretty good at resisting the –zoles and pyrantel so using these drugs doesn’t do much good unless you know they work on your farm. How do you know if they work? Fecal egg counts. Here at Springhill Equine we usually stick to ivermectin and moxidectin used as infrequently as possible, again based on those fecal egg counts.
Deworm at the right time of year for the biggest bang for your buck. You may find this hard to believe but worms don’t like summertime in Florida. This means if we deworm once the weather gets hot, all the worms get killed in the horse and the sunshine kills all the worms in the ground. That means less deworming because you are decreasing your horse’s exposure to parasites. Next we wait for the weather to cool off (like it does right around the time change) to hit the parasites coming out of summer hibernation. Ta Da! Targeted deworming!!!
These strategies help the dewormers we have now last as long as possible. It is very, very important that deworming is done with help from our amazing Clinic. All of our technicians and docs can help you design the plan that’s right for your horse, your property, and your horse’s lifestyle. There are no new dewormers even in development. That means when resistance to ivermectin becomes widespread, that’s it. We won’t have a way to deworm horses and worms used to kill horses. So be a good human and deworm your horse the right way!
Oct 25, 2016 | Craigslist
First of all, thank you to all my fans who came out to my Open House last weekend! A great time was had by all, and I was very pleased by the amount of attention I received that day. I hope you had as much fun as I did!
If you were paying attention, you may have noticed the cute, fat little piglet at Dr. Vurgason’s booth. This piglet is one of many that are purchased on Craigslist every day, often by unsuspecting owners. Online shopping on Craigslist is good for a lot of things. Finding an apartment to rent? Great! Need some gently used car furniture? Awesome. Do you want an appropriate forum for your sale of goat’s milk body soap? OK! But do you know what Craigslist is generally not good for? Buying a pet.
I have seen so many neglected horses, sick pigs, and generally ill-thrift animals come through the clinic that people have recently acquired online. Now, there are a few exceptions, and sometimes I see a perfectly healthy, well-behaved animal that was just like they said it would be online…but that is certainly not the rule. I think the problem lies in the fact that humans are too gullible these days! A cat like myself would never be fooled by one of these “free to a good home” scams.
There are certain phrases in the human language which used to be commonplace, and they helped to remind people why they should be skeptical when they see a horse for sale for cheap/free. For example, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Do you know why? Because chances are he is 100 years old and needs a ton of dental work done! Honestly I don’t know why I’m telling you this…that’s more work for us, and more chances you will bring him to the clinic and give me attention while you’re there. Phrase #2: “there’s no such thing as a free horse.” Basically there is no such thing as a free pet in general. If the price listed is less than you think the horse is worth, I can guarantee you are going to be paying more than the difference in basic veterinary care and feed. Let’s not forget the phrase, “he’s a little long in the tooth.” In horses, long in the tooth=old. Do you know how to age a horse by it’s teeth? I don’t, but the docs do! You should probably bring a knowledgeable horse person with you to look at the Craigslist horse so they can tell you if the horse listed as “about 8 years old” is actually 18, or even 28.
If you absolutely insist on buying an animal off of Craigslist, at least have one of our veterinarians do a pre-purchase examination on him before you pick him up. In general you should plan on spending 10 to 20% of the purchase price of a horse on the pre-purchase exam. I would argue that when buying from Craigslist, you should spend twice the listed purchase price on a pre-purchase exam, just because these animals are so much more likely to have serious medical problems. I see lots of people bringing horses to us after they have already been purchased, for what we term a post-purchase exam. They are usually surprised and disappointed by what the doctors find wrong with the horse, and it is too late for them to get their money back.
So, here are Tony’s rules for not getting scammed on Craigslist: 1) Beware of the word “broke.” A broke horse has many different meanings to different people. A horse that is broke to having a saddle put on its back is not necessarily broke enough for a child or beginner rider. 2) Make sure the horse is a registered member of an actual breed, especially if breeding or resale is important to you. Certain breed registries has very strict requirements but others are very lenient. If a horse is registered as “Grade,” that essentially means it is not eligible for any breed registry. 3) When buying a horse online pay attention to the horse’s condition. If the horse is underweight you may end up spending a lot of money in feed bills. If the horse is overweight he could be at risk for laminitis or other metabolic conditions that could cost you a lot of money. 4) The bottom line is to have our docs do a pre-purchase examination on the animal BEFORE you buy it. We are your advocates; we are on your side! Well, unless you make me move from my sunny spot in the driveway because you have to park your car…
Until next week,
Tony
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