Horse cut by barbed wire

["Tracey" <tracey@tbt.co.za>]

Hi, all,

 

 

Looks like the Christmas gremlins have it in for me again this year (don't even ask!!)

 

 

On Tuesday, I took Toc on an outride with a friend who was on her green horse.  Due to circumstances beyond our control (her horse jumped over a puddle of water onto my friend's foot, thereby making it impossible for her to get off and lead him past any further obstacles!) we had to go back via a place which does have barbed wire fencing running alongside the path.

 

 

Toc knows where the wire is as we've been this way before, but my friend's horse doesn't.  As I was guiding Toc past some wire on the path, my friend's horse passed us, and Toc, being a dork, napped towards Buster, ignoring my leg, complete with spur, which was at that stage engaged in a desperate attempt to get him AWAY from Buster and the wire and towards safety.  Toc, being a dork, managed to entangle his legs in the wire.

 

 

To compound his dorkiness, and earn himself the delightful epithet of "you utter, utter shit", Toc then reared (depositing me, back first, in the wire) and turned away, landing on the fence. 

 

 

Having got all of the above off my chest (thank you for your patience), he has managed to cut his foreleg, right at the top, beneath the shoulder (where his armpit would be if he had arms.  I know that there is a scientific term for this somewhere....).  The cut is about 1 cm deep, but the vet could not stitch it as he has done a kind of "rope burn" effect, and there just isn't enough good skin around each cut to stitch. 

 

 

We gave him an anti-tet injection, some penicillin, and cleaned the wound out with Betadine.  On my vet's advice, I put milking salve on top of the cut, both to keep dirt out and to keep the edges of the would soft, so that they didn't get all dry and flakey.

 

We are giving penicillin daily, hosing the wound out three times per day and cleaning with Betadine and putting the milking cream on at night.  Unfortunately, after the rain of the last few weeks, we are having a fly plague of biblical proportions, so I was wondering the following:

 

 

1.  What can I put on it to keep flies away; and

 

2.  Is there anything else I could be doing to make the wound heal more quickly; and

 

3.  What is the best thing to use to stop proud flesh from forming; and

 

4.  The wound has a swelling ABOVE the cut, which has some heat in it.  What can I use to poultice the wound, which won't irritate his cuts.  Toc is being his usual charming self about having any kind of medical treatment.  I'm waiting for his head to spin around and for him to puke up green soup; and

 

5.  Is it socially unacceptable to annihilate my horse, once he's over his wound, on the grounds that he is both a dork and a shit and, we are beginning to suspect, the anti-Christ? 

 

 

Bah, humbug!

 

 

Tracey