Ok, this isn’t endurance related other than the owner
of the horse is 72 years old and if she can, rides 5 miles every day of her
life. She is also on a fixed income and spent $8000 of her $12000 life
savings to buy this horse and doesn’t have a lot of options for expensive
diagnostics. She is one of my boarders and I feel terrible about the
horse and feel sorry for the owner even though I don’t like her decisions
so far.
Anyhow, the horse is a 6yo Peruvian Paso. By my
standards the legs are very small and by almost anyone’s standards the
horse is grossly overweight (1050, should be 850 or less). The owner
understands we all think the horse is fat, but her best friend has the horse’s
full sister who is even fatter (they both think it’s what the show ring
demands, but neither show), so is reluctant to drastically reduce her weight
since that horse is sound.
The horse has something like a windpuff on the left front and
one of the three vets who have seen her diagnosed that. The owner says
she got it from dancing around when the horse next to her was taken from its
stall to be ridden. The horse definitely favors that leg at times, but
the real problem that I see is on all four legs.
When the mare gets up, it takes her a long time, like she is
seriously sore. After she gets up, she can barely move, she looks like
she is going to die any minute because she is in so much pain. After an
hour, she looks better, but still in pain on all 4 with some favoring of the
one leg. Then her owner shows up a couple hours later (and I tell her how
bad the horse looks), so she takes her to the arena to move around. She
sees her being a little sore and then totally fine after running around a bit.
She looks like a 35yo horse with severe arthritis. Can horses have
rheumatoid arthritis?
It is sad watching this horse move – soooo much
action, such a big body on those little stick legs! But she sees her then
going sound so she rides her with no problems. I think she needs to stop
riding her, but her points are that she doesn’t know what’s wrong
so has a hard time not riding, she thinks if the horse loses her “riding
muscles” she’ll never be able to be ridden again, and that she is
72 years old and if she stops riding, that’s the end of her life (and
that may well be true).
I know this is long, but does anyone have any suggestions on
what the problem could be (fetlock have not dropped at all, so not DSLD) or any
diagnostics that we could help her with or that might be cheap? I am
working on the weight issue and she’s dropped 30-40 pounds but seeing no
improvement, she’s panicking that we’ll kill the horse by not
feeding her enough!
I’m sure I haven’t offered enough information,
so if you have questions, please feel free to take this off line and ask and
tell you what I know. This is long enough already!
Marlene
Marlene
Moss
www.LosPinos-CO.com
- boarding, training, sales
www.KineticEquineAnalysis.com
- saddlefit for the horse in motion
