HEALTH UPDATE ON SADIE MAE

Sadie has been out of commission since September due to lameness. We started with just padding the foot to see if that would help and it didn’t. I had the vet out and he x-rayed in November and it looked like there might be an abscess in the left front foot. The farrier followed up on that with aggressive digging out of hoof but nothing surfaced.

When Sadie came to us she was lame. She had, what we term, foundered a couple of years earlier and had not come back to soundness. Unfortunately this will leave the hooves in a weaker state than normal and subject to problems later in life. We did get her to a state of soundness in about three month of acquisition and have played the lameness/soundness dance since then. This is the longest bout.

Back to the present story. I had the vet come for another horse and while he was here I asked him to look at Sadie again. She was not improving and it looked to me like the right front hoof was in pain now too. Doc and I discussed the situation and he prescribed a pill to increase blood flow to the hooves. He told me to have the farrier shoe the right front like the left and to take her off wheat hay, only feed grass.

I started all the changes on January 10. The first two weeks I had to give 20 pills two times a day. They are the size of aspirin. She takes them from my hand and we are fine unless she drops one or more. I managed to spill them all just before I gave them to her. That was fun, digging in the dirt to find them all. We are now down to one administration of 20 each day until I use them all. We started with 1000.

The farrier worked on each front foot at different times since she hurt so badly to begin with. The left front foot was reshod Wednesday and she was able to bear weight (appeared comfortable) on the right front foot for the entire time. She walked out of the pen looking much better and resetting the shoe didn’t change anything as far as pain. Maybe she is on the mend. It appears that the right front is no longer painful and the left front improving. She still has trouble when asked to turn either direction but walking straight she looks pretty good.