Too Muddy for Safety

Saturday evening, one very muddy Stella favors a foreleg.

We have had rain several days over the last week, enough that the horse pasture is a sloppy mess. When there was a chill in the air over the weekend, our mares gallivanted up and down their hillside, kicking up mud and racing around. All was well until we noticed that Stella was down. She was stretched out full length in the mud and rain, in a posture more suited to sunbathing than the weather we were having.

When I went to investigate, she was calm but remained down. After I tied on a halter, she got right up--but one of her forelegs was canted out at an unusual angle and she would put no weight on that leg. Being Saturday night, we could not raise help through our regular veterinarian, so I consulted by phone with a friend and with two large animal veterinarians on call for other practices.

Although the conversation with the first veterinarian fed my darkest fears and led to me consulting with the disposal services she recommended, the second veterinarian took a more wait-and-see attitude. He suggested letting the mare wait for a couple of days and see how she fared.

Monday, Stella shares hay while receiving hydrotherapy to her shoulder.

After Stella had gotten up so quickly for me, I saw that she could not lie back down readily. When she finally tottered forward and fell to get back to the ground, I was very concerned; however, by Sunday morning she was up and moving about the pasture. Much reassured, assuming that she would not be moving about so readily if she had suffered a fracture, I treated her with a steady hosing with chilly well-water for 45-minute intervals twice on Sunday, and again on Monday.

Events conspired to keep me from contacting Doc Kinslow until Tuesday, by which time Stella had settled herself in a small area where she could nip at green shoots and push herself around on the hillside using the chicken coop for leverage. This was far from ideal. After Doc sent me home with a prescription for the pain and swelling, we agreed to give her a couple of more days and see how she fared.

Although she was getting around again, by Wednesday the leg was useless.

Unfortunately, she did not fare well. What had started out as a swollen shoulder graduated to an entirely swollen leg. And while she became more mobile again, she was not using the leg at all--it just hung uselessly and dragged. What we had hoped would turn out to be a pulled muscle was far more serious.

She was a valiant gal, but we knew she was too injured for what we could do for her, and we said our goodbyes this morning. After she was gone, the remaining two mares called out for her periodically throughout the rainy afternoon. They had seen their friend leave, and did not understand why she was not coming back. This was a very sad day here on the farm.