Tigger went in for regular immunizations, Coggins test (for Equine Infectious Anemia, annual test required federally), dental work (“floating”…actually means grinding teeth down…more on that later) , and a lameness exam.\u00a0\u00a0 I also wanted to talk to the vet about his change in behavior in the last six months.\u00a0 Rags went in for the same things, except no lameness exam.\u00a0\u00a0 Laci, who hauls for me, and has done training on Mocha (after Mocha dumped me….and later dumped Laci…found her a home with a rancher that’s worked because Mocha is a man’s mare), Molly, and Kalli.\u00a0 She discovered that Molly was good at running low-level barrels (so she went to a girl who was crazy to run barrels), and Kalli developed intractable founder and had to be put down.\u00a0 She is really, really good with horses.\u00a0 She was going to help me with Tigger before he got injured, but afterward nobody knew if he’d ever be sound enough.\u00a0 The last time I had him tested, over a year ago, he was better but still lame in the right hind.\u00a0 The answer for that was…pasture, 24\/7.\u00a0 No work but a little in-hand work, but not longeing or anything that puts more stress on the relevant joints.<\/p>\n
Both horses were hyper this morning, what with a bustling busy “wet” wind (not raining but very moist-feeling), and having Laci there.\u00a0 We had to walk them up our drive onto the street, and then up to the corner of the other street where the horse trailer was parked…and in which there were three other horses also going to the vet.\u00a0\u00a0 Tigger knows Laci and behaved fairly well, though he was being a “giraffe” with his head way up in the air and his neck straight up.\u00a0 Rags, whom I was leading, was being a butt-head and pulling me along rather than walking quietly beside me.\u00a0 However, they both loaded into the trailer, Tig first and then Rags, right up against the back doors.\u00a0 And off we went for the half-to-3\/4 hour trip to the vet clinic.\u00a0 When they were brought in, they got their Coggins and their shots, and Rags was taken off to be tranked and then have his teeth done.<\/p>\n
Horses are tranquilized for their dental work, and you can’t do a full soundness evaluation with a tranked horse (esp. Tig, who weighs remarkably little for his height: Rags is shorter but heavier.)\u00a0 So Rags got his teeth done first, and then Tigger got his lameness exam and *then* his dental stuff.\u00a0 Both the farrier and I thought Tigger was moving completely sound, but the vet has the last word.\u00a0 A horse is trotted on a hard, level surface (in this case the concrete of the floor under a high ceiling so that every hoofbeat can be clearly heard.\u00a0 First in straight lines, and then if sound in straight lines, in circles both ways, and then after a test of the compression and mobility of each hind leg (when you know what you’re looking for was in that end of the horse.)\u00a0\u00a0 The vet also palpated his back from just above the withers to the tail root, especially around the SI joint where the sacrum and spine and pelvic ilium come together.\u00a0 That’s the joint that Tigger fell over backwards onto when he didn’t clear the 5′ fence, and it’s a critical joint for horses…if it’s injured and doesn’t heal, they cannot carry weight or pull anything without pain.\u00a0 Walking and then trotting on a hard flat surface without anything to trip over reveals any unevenness…and in this building, loudly and clearly.\u00a0 (If they’re unsound in walk, they’re not trotted…unsound in walk is enough.)<\/p>\n
Tigger produced a perfect four-beat walk (clop clop clop clop) and then in trot a perfect two-beat one, the diagonal pairs (front left\/back right, front right\/back left)\u00a0 exactly as loud as each other.\u00a0 On the straight, on circles in both directions, after the flexion test on each leg.\u00a0\u00a0 He is now physically sound, and cleared by the vet to return to work…that he hasn’t done for three years.\u00a0 In fact, the vet (and Laci) recommend that he start being brought back into working fitness right away…not ridden (he’s lost a lot of his “topline” muscle and also some of his abs that are necessary for building topline muscle) but starting with longe line work, then ground driving\/long-lining, trotting over ground poles and raised poles on the longe or ‘in the lines’, and then when he’s rebuilt some of that, seeing if he can be ridden. This will involve his mental health as well as his physical fitness, because he already had some problems there when I bought him, and along with severe damage to his SI joint, he also slammed the back of his head on the ground when he fell, jarring his little brain.\u00a0 Horses can get concussions and as with people, it can change their personality.\u00a0 Tigger’s increasing irritability, nipping Rags and trying to nip him particularly when I was working with him, his not wanting to be groomed or handled, etc., could be long-term brain damage or, conversely, a sign of Rags getting more of my attention and more privilege (from a horse’s perspective even getting to be ridden out on the land is privilege…more space, more things to do.)\u00a0 Horses, esp. the “hot” breeds, hate both confinement and boredom.<\/p>\n
So Tigger will now go into training (though not for the next two weeks, because Laci is hauling several horses and two students to Oklahoma for a big barrel-racing event) and Laci will work with him.\u00a0 First here, at weekly intervals, until Tigger has really formed a working-level bond, and then at her place, where he will get worked daily.\u00a0 The goal is to restore his earlier training step by step, ending with (we hope) backing him again and getting him rideable in a bitless bridle (because of his earlier tongue damage.)\u00a0 And in the process, get him calmer, happier, less frustrated and edgy.\u00a0 If this succeeds, and we end up with a happier horse that can do things humans also enjoy (such as riding)\u00a0 safely, he has a much better chance of not ending up in a kill pen after I die (at his age and my age, he could easily outlive me.)<\/p>\n
OK: horse dental stuff for non-horse people.\u00a0 Horses chew sideways, back and forth, and their food is largely grass, which contains silica even if it’s not grown in a sandy place.\u00a0 So their teeth grind each other, uppers and lowers, back and forth.\u00a0 Their teeth continue to grow (“long in the tooth” is not just a metaphor: an older horse’s teeth are longer above the gumline, with less left in the jaw below.)\u00a0 They don’t grind *evenly* in many cases, and the parts that aren’t ground off readily form points and edges that are sharp and poke into the sides of their mouths.\u00a0 Horses react to this pain\u00a0 by holding their heads at different angles when they chew, and if they’re being ridden with a bit in the mouth, they will react to that bit differently.\u00a0 Dental work for horses is largely (not exclusively) grinding off the rough, sharp, edges and points, restoring the flatter grinding surfaces to be more efficient and of course non-painful.\u00a0 In the old days, vets arrived with an array of flat rasps on long handles, which they’d put in the horse’s mouth one by one, while the horse had a brace holding its mouth open, and then rasp manually.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, vets use an electric drill (basically) with a long narrow pipe that rotates a grinding end.\u00a0 And they have bright little LED lights that clip to the vet’s head band or to the horse’s halter (I’ve seen both) and shine very clearly into the horse’s mouth.\u00a0 They have rolling stools that let them work from a lower level than they used to.\u00a0 It’s noisy and the horse feels the vibration of course, as we do with dentists at work (my turn tomorrow o joy!)\u00a0 but it’s tranked so it isn’t worried as much.\u00a0 The horse is standing in “stocks”….a small enclosure the width of a horse, with adjustable barriers for different *lengths* of horse, and over head pipes that make it possible to put the horse’s head where the vet wants it for whatever’s being done there.\u00a0\u00a0 (Horses are also put in stocks for other procedures as well, including surgeries for which they don’t need to be laid down.)<\/p>\n
After this, we came back here, put the horses in the horse lot, and I gave Laci some of my old equipment and the one bitless bridle I’d bought for Tig just before his accident.\u00a0\u00a0 I had a surcingle and driving reins, for instance, and she can use them on her other horses before Tig’s ready for that stage, and then on him.<\/p>\n
And she and her assistant went off to lunch and I went inside and rested until I could eat and then went to sleep for the afternoon until feeding time.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t sleep much the night before the vet visit; I usually don’t.\u00a0 (Yes, Tigger and I share some personality traits; it’s why I’ve always liked “hot” horses.)\u00a0\u00a0 We saw lots of bluebonnets on the trip there and back, and I got to show Laci’s assistant where I get to ride (from the outside; they needed to get back to her place with the other horses.)<\/p>\n
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Tigger went in for regular immunizations, Coggins test (for Equine Infectious Anemia, annual test required federally), dental work (“floating”…actually means grinding teeth down…more on that later) , and a lameness exam.\u00a0\u00a0 I also wanted to talk to the vet about his change in behavior in the last six months.\u00a0 Rags went in for the same Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,48,16],"tags":[52,49,17],"class_list":["post-1254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-80-acres","category-horses","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-80acres","tag-horses","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1255,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions\/1255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}