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[RC] speculation, and a proposal - terreI hesitate to write this, because it amounts to the kind of speculation without data to validate it that we need to avoid, but...It is my 'feeling' that many of the metabolic crashes that seem to come 'out of the blue' are due to an inability on our parts to accurately assess the degree of dehydration in some horses. IOW, the parameters we use to assess dehydration are not quite doing the job in all cases. Had a private conversation a while ago with a person who said something like "I guess all horses have different needs, because I have one who never drinks on the first few loops and still gets As/Bs for hydration". I said something like "if you drove your truck for 3 hours and the gauge still said "Full", would you assume you hadn't used any fuel?" I think we all know horses who aren't drinking well but continue to get good grades for hydration--that's why the vets ASK if they are drinking--they cannot tell just by looking! Pulse/recovery doesn't seem to catch them all, and I don't see how an exit CRI/check would help... The only two ways I know of to accurately assess dehydration are 1)Hematocrit and 2)loss of body weight. The first is virtually impossible to do on all horses in the field, and the second might well be inaccurate (because another pet theory of mine is that many horses arrive in camp dehydrated and don't replace that loss, so the baseline would be wrong; and also because unless the horses were weighed without tack each time the weight loss might not show). So here is my proposal--that all treated horses have blood drawn for hematocrit (or a plasma/serum protein marker) and that the results of this test along with the rider card be submitted to an AERC committee struck to compile the data. This test is not expensive and the cost could be borne by the rider or AERC; the vet is 'going into the vein' anyway, so drawing the samples is not a great deal more work. If riders wanted a whole panel done, they could pay for that... Attempting to analyse all of the data associated with all metabolic crashes might, indeed, be too ambitious a project to implement easily. Focusing on one parameter (or a few selected parameters) along with assessment of the rider card and some input from the rider may be a more reasonable approach. terre (since writing this, I now see Sue Garlinghouse has even volunteered!)
Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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