Our First Horse

Poor Cash. He’s been with us since June, but we honestly don’t think he wants to be here. We were concerned when he came here on a visit and escaped, but chalked it up to his being in a new place with new horses. Since then, though, he just acts like he’d rather be somewhere else. First of all, he’s broken down the fence more than once; he’s gotten out again (but thankfully didn’t take off that time); he tried to escape between the truck and the barn when we were bringing the chipper/shredder into the pasture; and he is still afraid of the other horses. And if his general unhappiness in the pasture weren’t enough, he is apparently allergic to something out there too.

One day the week before last, Cash had a swollen eye when he came in for his grain. I mean, BIG. (Not the eyeball, but both eyelids.) So we called the vet out, and she stained it to check for scratches. There was a questionable spot, but for the most part it looked OK other than the swelling, so she gave him a couple of eye ointments and some bute. We decided he most likely had gotten some dirt in his eye while he was rolling - his favorite thing in the world. The eye was 100% better by the next day. We continued the eye ointment for a few days and everything was fine.

Then last Wednesday he had two swollen eyes. He looked like a prizefighter who’d gone a few too many rounds. So we called the vet out again (thank goodness I work for the vet!) and she sedated him again, stained both eyes this time, and found no scratches again. His eyes were all goopy too, so she thinks it’s probably an allergy. This time he got more eye ointment and antihistamines. But within an hour after she left, we checked on him to discover that all four legs were swollen from the knees/fetlocks down (or “stocked up,” in horse-speak). She sent another medication home with my friend Shari (who also works at the vet - I was off that day) for the swelling. This time it took a couple of days for the eyes to clear up. The legs went down by the next day.

We’re all pretty sure that the eye symptoms are caused by an allergy, but we’re stumped as to what it could be. The only new thing we’ve introduced recently is bermuda grass hay, but we started feeding it a couple of weeks before his first episode. Also, why was it only one eye the first time? We think it might just be something in bloom out in the pasture, but isolating that would be nearly impossible. We are eventually going to mow down everything out there and plant grass, so hopefully that will take care of it if a pasture allergen is the problem. In the meantime, we just watch his eyes very carefully and keep antihistamines and eye ointment on hand.

The poor guy. If we didn’t like him so darn much, we’d think about finding him a home were he might be happier.

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I know you’ve heard it before: “X is my life,” or “He eats, breathes and sleeps X.” Well, I’m hear to tell you that horses have actually become our life. Occasionally, work or sleep or some other mundane thing intrudes, but generally everything we do in some way relates to the fact that we have horses.

This weekend, for instance, we drove all the way to Knoxville (about an hour) to rent a chipper/shredder at Home Depot on Saturday. We spent about six hours collecting fallen trees and branches in the pasture and sending them through that terrifying, but oddly satisfying, maw of wood death. Then on Sunday we drove the hour back to Knoxville (missing church, btw) to return the behemoth within our 24-hour rental period. We are both so sore we can hardly move and have stuffy noses from the dust, and our bank account is $150 lighter (not counting the gas to drive up there and back twice) - but about 27 tons of deadfall is now nice, neat mulch. Of course we want our pasture to look nice, and that’s probably why most people would spend their Saturday clearing it out, but frankly we could have left all that stuff indefinitely. That’s a lot of hard work, and the “natural” look is best for a pasture, don’t you think? But our horses walk through the woods out there all the time, and we’ve been concerned for their safety for months now. So once again, we devoted a weekend to horse maintenance. Last weekend…well, I don’t actually remember last weekend, but past weekends have included putting up hay, fixing fences, fixing barn stalls, clearing weeds in the pasture, driving to the city to get horse supplies - oh, and actual riding, once in a while. Our weekends coming up will include installing a new outlet to plug in the stock tank de-icer, building out the unfinished stall for Romeo, fixing up the old barn for hay storage, installing electric fence…and that’s just what has to be done before winter.

I wish we had known ahead of time how time-consuming horse ownership really is. On second thought, maybe it was better not to know.

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Funny title, not a funny subject. We recently received the following note here at Our First Horse:

“My sister lives in Cumberland City and recently found four horses left on her property. She is not familiar with the horses and does not recognize them as any of her neighbors’ horses. They appear to be in relatively good health with a few minor wounds and they haven’t been groomed in a long time. No one has come to look for them they have been there for four days now.”

The writer was looking for information on how to find the owner or legally keep the horses. I’m not really sure about either one but the situation brings up a timely subject: how horses are faring these days, with the current economic climate and the ban on slaughter. I have to say, things are not looking good.

In addition to the above letter, I personally know of two cases locally of abandoned horses. The first one is that of a neighbor of the vet clinic where I work. A woman called to ask us to post a notice on our board - like the writer above’s sister, she had found a horse on her property and had been unable to identify an owner. The consensus around our office, staff and visitor alike, was that the owner intentionally “lost” the horse. The second case supports that theory. One of our clients, who has cattle but not horses, brought a horse trailer to a stock auction to haul equipment home. He was inside for a while and when he came back out to his trailer, he found two horses inside with a note saying something along the lines of, “I can’t feed my horses - please take care of them.” They were thin, but otherwise in good condition. So sad.

I’m sure there are many more stories like this, here and everywhere else. I know Bill has written before about the horses being abandoned in the Arizona desert. It seems to us that things will get worse before they get better. We are blessed here in East Tennessee with a good hay crop this summer, so we’ve been able to get hay this year for decent prices. Others are not so lucky. Also, while hay was cheap and plentiful for us, everything else is going way up. We are literally paying twice as much for oats as we were a year ago. We’re fortunate to be able to absorb the extra costs, so far, but we know that there are a lot of people out there who can’t do so, at least not for long. We’re concerned about what will happen to those horses.

Just another reason to hope that things will get better very soon.

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We have been SO busy here the last few weeks. We’ve been traveling, on business and pleasure; the Kid is back in school; Bill and I have both been busy with work; and countless chores (e.g., fence and barn repair - thanks, Cash!) are eating up our time.

On top of that, for about 2 months, I’ve been having problems with my right foot. It has been sore on the ball of my foot right where it rests in the stirrup. I finally went to a podiatrist and she diagnosed it as a Morton’s neuroma. I’ve had 2 shots of cortisone and it’s improved a bit, but it’s still sore enough to make riding unpleasant. So the result of all these things together is that we have four horses in the pasture that are not being ridden. And the weather is getting cooler…it’s the perfect time to ride, ever so briefly, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. So frustrating!

So that’s where we’ve been. What’s up with you all? I’m sure you’re spending your cooler fall days and trail rides, or at the last of the horse shows of the season, getting all kinds of riding in before it gets too cold. We’re so jealous.

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When the weather’s nice, our horses are only in the barn for about 15 minutes a day, when we feed them grain. We let them into their stalls, they have their grain, then they go on out again. A few days ago, we were watching Cash finish up, marveling at how very dirty he is. The reason he’s so dirty is because he likes to roll, and as we were standing there watching, he did that very thing. He knelt down just like a camel, rolled on to his back, wiggled back a forth a couple of times, then kicked out his back feet to flip back over…knocking the stall door off its hinges in the process. It was really quite impressive - he didn’t kick very hard at all, but those hinges didn’t stand a chance. So we got some longer bolts, which hopefully will fare better.

I’ll tell you, whenever wood splinters around this place - and it happens too darn often - Cash is almost always behind it. Troublemaker.

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A very handsome horse caught our eye the other day (no, not as a prospective addition to our herd - we’ve reached our limit) - a big, muscled, Quarter Horse stallion. He was something else. Bill wondered why he wasn’t gelded, and if he might be used as a stud someday. I told him that the owner might go ahead and geld him, because he comes from the “Impressive” line. Bill, naturally, was confused by that: “Well, if he’s from an impressive line, why wouldn’t you breed him?” But unfortunately, it’s not an impressive line, it’s the Impressive line, as in “Impressive,” AQHA stallion and halter champion, famous for siring 2,250 foals. He is also considered to be the beginning of a bloodline carrying a debilitating and often fatal genetic mutation known as HYPP, for Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis. Sounds scary, huh? It really is.

I had to look up “hyperkalemic.” “Hyperkalemia” is an abnormally high concentration of potassium in the blood. This condition is caused in HYPP horses because their potassium regulation system is messed up. The controls get out of whack every once in a while (”periodically”) and cause a big surge of potassium. This causes the “paralysis” part of the name: potassium controls the voltage currents in muscle cells, so the potassium influx is sort of a “power surge” like the kind that can fry your electronics. The horse loses muscle control to some degree; the severity varies quite a bit, from little twitches to a fatal heart attack (the heart is a muscle too). Scary enough for you?

There are a few important things to know about HYPP. One is, it’s a genetic defect, so your horse cannot “catch” it; they are born with it. Also, the gene is a dominant one - only one parent has to carry the gene for it to be passed on to the offspring. Horses can have HYPP and show no signs of it; only a DNA test can tell whether your horse has it or not. As I said, HYPP is believed to have come from the Impressive line (the most recent count of his living descendants was 55,000 in 2003), so it’s most common in Quarter Horses, but is also found in the closely-related Paint Horse and Appaloosa lines, and of course can be found in other breeds if they have been cross-bred to Quarter Horses.

HYPP can be manageable, depending on the severity. Since it is a potassium issue, diet is very important. Also, stress can trigger an episode, so the horse’s environment and lifestyle are important factors. There are also medications that can ease symptoms and help prevent episodes.

A critical thing to consider if you or someone you know has an HYPP horse is that an attack can occur at any time, including when you are riding the horse. Any rider should be very experienced and always alert for signs, because your horse could literally collapse underneath you.

Now for the controversial stuff. How can HYPP be prevented or even wiped out? Obviously, since it’s an issue of genetics, if HYPP-positive horses don’t breed, the mutation can’t be passed on. That sounds simple, but while the downsides of HYPP are scary, the flip side of the Impressive line is that the horses bred from that line are highly muscled, very strong, show-winning horses. That’s how Impressive came to sire 2,250 foals - he was, indeed, impressive. So there will always be breeders willing to take that gamble for a desirably conformed horse. For now, the only control to prevent HYPP-positive foals is that when a horse is registered with the American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA), its HYPP status is included in that registration. Any potential breeder will know if the horse is a risk or not.

Well, there’s my very unprofessional, Internet-educated opinion of Impressive and HYPP. If this issue might affect you, I encourage you to do your own research. I, for one, may look into having Romeo (Appaloosa) and perhaps even Moonshine (part Quarter Horse) tested. Even though they surely would have shown signs by now, my web research has once again made me paranoid.

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