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Maureen's story, Part 1 |
(more on Cream dilutes) |
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| Spending even one month on rehab can get tiring, and many cases will take longer than that - it is common for soft tissue injuries to run six months or more. If there are other people in your family, find out ahead of time if they are willing to pick up the slack when you need some time off. Even scheduling one free day every couple of weeks will help to relieve your stress load, better allowing you to encourage the healing process. You will also have to consider the cost of supplies for rehab, depending on the type of injury or condition. A horse requiring the vet to cast a leg may need to be recast half a dozen times during the first month or so. A horse with a severed tendon may require the farrier to build a special support shoe. Vetrap and other first aid kit supplies don't last long once daily treatments start, nor do medications such as bute, penicillin or alternate therapies such as MSM and homeopathic remedies. As you can see, there is lots to consider besides just the original monetary cost of vets visits, treatments and surgeries if necessary - and as horse owners we do have to be practical. Sometimes the odds are simply overwhelming - the vet may tell you that even with 6 months or more of healing time, and extreme dedication to wound management on your part, that your horse only has a 10% chance of being useful again. If your horse is not being considered as a breeding animal, then you may not have a lot of options left - it is expensive to keep a horse as a pet. Many times mares are fated to the broodmare band when a crippling injury sidelines them from the performance arena - these mares spend the next decade or more producing babies every year while living in constant pain due to arthritis, muscle spasms, and more. You also have to think about the horse's quality of life in best and worst case healing scenarios. If the horse stands a good chance of returning to complete health and soundness, the time and effort seems far more worthwhile than if the horse will suffer from chronic pain for the remainder of his life. It is these times that we have to consider the end of the line - the thought of leaving an animal in chronic pain for the rest of its life is something that gives us a serious decision to make.
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Maureen also writes us from Alberta. Many people on the albertahorse mailing list I am on were very helpful and quick to share their experiences when asked. Reading through other people's experiences is a good way to help us prepare for the eventuality of death.
----- I have an experience to relate about putting down old horses. I had to make the difficult decision to put down the first horse that I ever owned. I had her since I was 13 years old and she was not quite 2 years old. So the decisions that I made were heart wrenching and made with a lot of thought and planning. I had made the decision that when Apache was no longer having a good quality of life or that she was suffering from pain that I would have her life ended at home with myself present. I had little time to make those decisions when it happened. Other than one injury and one very mild bout with founder and colic, this horse had been healthy all her life. Her second bout of colic happened on a stormy December Saturday. It was mild to start with but I immediately called the vet. We are over an hour's drive one way from a vet. I blanketed her and kept her warm and walking until he arrived. The colic seemed to have subsided but he treated her and gave me medicine to continue treating her with. Both of us realized that her age might have something to do with it, (she was 28 years old) and the fact that although I had had her teeth floated recently, they still weren't in the best of shape. She seemed to recover for a few hours but by Sunday morning, she was getting worse again. She kept trying to have a bowel movement but nothing was happening. I phoned the vet again. He was 3 hours away from me on another emergency. The vet had me listen to her heart and showed me how to test her gums for circulatory problems. He told me that if her heart rate went too high and her temperature started to drop then her systems were shutting down and the prognosis would not be good. Unfortunately this is exactly what started happening. I knew also that she was in pain because she started to grind her teeth and once in a while she would kick at the barn wall. I had been up with her all night, I even slept out in the barn (which is not heated) with her. I decided after numerous phone calls with the vet and the only other experienced horse person in the community that the time had come to say good bye. It was one of the hardest decisions that I had ever made. Now came the problem, the vet was still over 2 hours away and another hour before he could even think of leaving the call that he was on. (He told me later that that weekend he had 3 caesareans and a thrown calf bed and none of them were in the same community). I could wait three hours for the vet to come and put her down with a needle that would cause her to go to sleep quietly or I could have her shot. |
Back before Christmas, I mentioned three of the cream dilute colours - palomino, buckskin, and cremello. There are several others that are also of interest. Smoky black is the name given to the colour that occurs when the cream gene is crossed on black. The cream gene actually remains hidden, though it can alter the black coat sometimes to make it look slightly smoky instead of true black. Often smoky blacks are not identified until they have dilute offspring of their own, as happened with a black and white pinto mare owned by Mountain View Trailriding in Smithers. When crossed on a sorrel and white stallion, Phoenixia foaled two palominos (one solid and one pinto). Since we know that the sorrel stallion has red-red genes (plus of course his tobiano gene), the dilute gene had to come from Phoenixia. When I asked Angelika if she knew what colours the mares parents were, the answer became clear. One of the mare's parents was a black and white, and the other? A palomino, which had passed on the cream dilute gene. The other colours of interest are perlino and smoky cream. These two are both double dilutes like the cremello, but with different base colours. A cremello results from two dilute genes on a red based horse (ie, remove the two dilute genes and you'd have a sorrel or chestnut). The perlino would actually be a bay, except that it has two copies of the cream gene. A perlino looks very similar to the cremello, except that it sometimes can be identified by a mane and tail that are darker or even reddish looking rather than pure white or cream. And of course, the smoky cream is a double dilute on black - in that case the cream does mask the black, rather than the black hiding the cream (as in many smoky blacks). You can always find out more about them at www.doubledilute.com - there are interactive colour charts, good pictures, and much, much more! Next week, we'll look at the dun dilute genes.
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If you have tips or questions you'd like to share with other local equestrians, please mail them to kristi@hiway16.com
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