State of the Barn Address

The boys are both doing better. Yesterday was the first day of the new year that no one got any drugs.  I know, crazy right?

Ben is feeling like his old self.  He still shows some soreness in his right front because of the laminitic changes in that foot.  However, I doubt anyone but me would notice.  I trimmed the foot again this morning and brought the heel down another couple of millimeters and that has helped.  It will take 8-10 months of careful trimming for that to fully heal, but he is nearly 100% sound on it.  Considering that there were a few days last month when I came very close to making that last vet visit for Ben, I think he is doing very well now.

Meanwhile, he is happy and feeling good enough to be ornery about being locked in for breakfast this morning.  When he gets impatient, he kicks the back wall, which is not good for his leg or the wall.  He does not do it often anymore because every time it happens, I add an extra 10 minutes to his incarceration and refuse to let him out until he stands politely.  He is a smart fellow and he knows better, I take this morning's protest as a sign of good health.  Besides, it is hard to stay mad at him because he wants his freedom so he can come over to me and get his daily hug quota.  It is hard to be annoyed with a giant donkey who just wants a hug and an ear rub.

I had still been giving Ramsey Previcox every day as he was sore and short-strided without it.  After Ramsey had surgery when he was a baby, he had a lot of trouble with the tendon contracting in that leg because he would not use it.  To this day, whenever he gets lame on that leg and he stops using it fully, that tendon contracts again.  It happens in just a matter of hours and is why pain management is crucial for him.  Ramsey may be all grown up now, but inside, he is still the baby donkey who spent two weeks at Cornell.

We have had a lot of cold, damp weather this winter and that really seems to bother Ramsey.  Today though, the sun came out and we had a glorious sunny day in the 40's.  I skipped the pain med and he did fine.  If he gets stiff again, I am going to try him on the turmeric paste once more as I hate to have him on pain medication for prolonged periods, especially at his age.  I suspect he will always need something to help in the winter months, but he is better.  Sunshine sure does help.

Ramsey is still not thrilled to have Ben around.  He has accepted it and they coexist well enough, but Ramsey would not mind in the least if Ben were to disappear.  I had hoped that Ramsey would like having another gelding around to play with, but mostly, he just feels like his home has been invaded.  He tolerates the occupying force, but he would still rather hang out with Mom.

I don't think Ramsey will ever grow up.  Which is OK because I love him as is:)

The girls are doing well.  Tessa is fine with Ben.  She loves her donkeys and Ben is just that much more to love.  She is a funny horse who generally lives in a state of semi clueless contentment.  She is entirely oblivious to the subtler donkey dramas going on under her nose and lives in a bubble of happiness that I often wish I could enter.  If I could bottle that, I'd make billions selling it as an anti-depressant.  She is also the herd defender though.  If she sees something that might pose a threat to her herd, she wakes right up and charges in to defend them.  Coyotes give my pasture a very wide berth.

Emma is usually the bridge between Ben and Ramsey.  She has a somewhat hesitant friendship with Ben that both annoys and fascinates Ramsey and it often draws him in, if only so he does not feel left out.  Of all my animals, Emma has the most complex personality (well...she and Connor might share that honor).  She remains shy, thoughtful and wary, but is also the quickest learner and the bravest (and most stubborn) of the bunch.  Emma knows her mind and it takes a mighty effort to change it.

The herd are all finally doing well once again.

Me though - my nerves are shot, 2017 has already been a tough year.

Everyone agrees that this latest problem is definitely a tick borne disease, but it does not show up on a regular Lyme test.  It is either a strain of Lyme that the tests do not recognize or it is some other tick borne disease that we can't identify.  Ben was hit the hardest, but he has recovered. The tough part now is that this disease really exacerbated any underlying defect in the hooves and joints and that will linger.

Ben had some minor hoof wall separation in his right front foot when this started and that turned into laminitis.  Ramsey's right front foot is compromised because of his surgery and he has some arthritis in that leg as well.  This illness went straight for the weakest points and hit them hard.

There was a question about whether or not the Lyme vaccine I gave everybody was effective at all.

The answer is: I have no idea.

Will I continue to vaccinate them for Lyme?  Probably.  The data I have seen so far indicates that it does work in horses.

Does that mean it works in donkeys?  No one has any idea.

It may be that the vaccine did help.  Ramsey has a longer vaccine history than Ben and he was not as bad as Ben.  Did the vaccine help?  Was it because I caught it early?

Beats me.  Maybe the vaccine only helps Tessa and just makes me feel like I am doing something to protect the donkeys.  I don't know that either.  I also don't know what else I could do.

The vaccine does not cover all of the different strains of Lyme and it doesn't do anything for other tick borne diseases.  And that is what has me really stressed.  I feel like I am under siege and I have no way to protect my animals from an enemy that can't see or defend against.  That is a problem I see no solution for and one that is going to keep my barn on high alert.

A Long Saga

I've been meaning to write about Hawkeye for ages now.  Long time readers will remember that he is Riding Buddy's horse and he has had issues with his feet for many years.  He has a long history of white line disease, hoof-wall separation, thin soles, long toes and severely contracted heels.  He is also highly sensitive to sugar an we treat him as insulin resistant.

The first year that I worked on his feet, we saw huge improvement.  Although we never did get the really robust foot we hoped for, he did grow in a comparatively healthy foot with good wall connection and decent sole depth.  He was sound in the pasture, but still needed hoof boots for riding on stony ground, which is about the best you can hope given the soil conditions in the area..  He was in good shape given where he had started and the limitations we have to work with.

The environment that hawkeye lives in is incurably wet, stony and extremely acidic.  It is basically an old bog filled in with rocks and it is a very tough, hostile place for hooves despite the effort and care RB puts into it. There is only so much that can be done to improve the fundamental geology of the place so we work with what we have.  There is pea gravel outside the barn, copious drainage ditches and a beautiful, immaculate barn.  Despite the environmental issues, Hawkeye went form being chronically sore, aloof and unhappy to sound, outgoing and content.

Last year, all that fell apart.

It started as a very subtle thing.  The first I remember noticing, is saying to RB that Hawkeye seemed withdrawn and unhappy again.  He never showed any specific lameness, but I could always see pain and tension in his carriage and affect.  Sometimes it seemed like his knees, other times, I swore it was in his hip.  And, every day, his feet got a little worse.  No matter what I did, the toes got longer, the soles thinner and the white line disintegrated to the point that he could barely walk.

We scratched our heads, tweaked his already tightly controlled and balanced diet, studied his gait and added up his years -we came up with more than we had thought - Hawkeye is about 20 years old.  We figured arthritis was getting the best of him and started having very bleak discussions about quality of life.  Hawkeye retired and RB went out and bought a new horse (which is a whole other story).

Every time I saw Hawkeye though, something nagged at me about him.  It just didn't add up.  Twenty isn't all that old and I could just see that something wasn't right. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I could feel the wrongness.  Finally, last Fall, he was tested for Lyme disease and he was off-the-charts positive.  We finally had an answer to everything and all of his vague, shifting symptoms suddenly made a lot of sense.

I had long suspected that Lyme disease could have been a problem, but there is so much controversy and misinformation about it, that, up until the past couple of years, when it has reached epidemic stage in this area, it was difficult to get any kind of diagnosis.  Even with a diagnosis, most vets used to be reluctant to treat it.  Many horses test positive without showing signs (or the signs go unnoticed or are misinterpreted) so it used to be considered not worth treating.  Lyme tends to fall into a Catch 22 type of hole, many of the subtle symptoms of Lyme go unnoticed until the horse is treated and because the symptoms go unnoticed, they don't ever get treatment. 

Hawkeye was our first definitive encounter with Lyme Disease.  He is why I knew to take action when I saw the same subtle wrongness in my herd this past Spring.  In retrospect, I strongly suspect that Lakota probably suffered from chronic Lyme.  His vague, but devastating symptoms were similar.

Hawkeye was put on 4 days of I.V. Oxytetracycline followed by 30 days of Minocycline, which is now considered to be THE drug of choice for treating Lyme in horses.  We chose Minocycline because Doxycycline was not available at the time.  However, since then, it has proven to be much more effective than the doxy, with a 100% cure rate - so far.

According to several veterinary sources, Minocycline is the better choice because it passes through the blood-brain barrier. The hardest part of treating Lyme is that the spirochetes which cause the disease burrow into tissues where neither antibiotics nor the body's own immune system cannot reach.  It is this nasty little fact that makes Lyme so difficult to treat and also why it causes such diverse symptoms.  In an attempt rid itself of the disease, the victims own body turns against itself, often causing symptoms that mimic autoimmune diseases.  Some researchers believe that "chronic Lyme" is actually an autoimmune problem triggered by Lyme.  The most successful treatment options are to either use multiple, pulsed doses of antibiotic or use a drug that can reach more areas of the body, such as Minocycline.

Treatment helped Hawkeye immensely, but it wasn't the immediate cure for his feet that we would have liked because no amount of antibiotics can regrow a healthy hoof for him.  His feet had degraded to the point that he was stuck in another sort of Catch 22, negative feedback loop.

His feet hurt so he did not move well.  Exercise and normal movement are what is needed to stimulate healthy hoof growth, but his feet hurt so he didn't move.  Added to that, he does have some genuine osteoarthritis issues, aside from the lameness and muscle soreness caused by Lyme.  His sore feet made the arthritis worse, which made him reluctant to move, which made his feet worse, which made the arthritis worse.........  We needed a way to break the cycle, and that is where my experiments with Easyshoes that I did last year come in.

To be continued....