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[RC] Old endurance horse lameness - k s swigart

Angie said after a long descritpoin of symptoms, attemps at diagnostics, and 
attempts at treatment;


Any advice is welcome.


If it were my horse, I would put him down.

Further treatment without a diagnosis is just shooting in the dark; further 
diagnostics are probably going to be very expensive and likely to lead to 
diagnosis of a condition that is either impossible or too expensive to treat.

That said:

If it IS cellulitis.? My horse had that.? She spent 4 days in the hospital on 
IV anti-biotics and then another two weeks on the oral anti-biotic 
chlorampheocol (sp?) which had to be adminstered 4 times a day at six hour 
intervals (total bill was over $3000 and the treatment was damned inconvenient 
during the "drug her 4 times a day" phase).? 

In addition to "sweating" it for it 2+ weeks. Have you tried that?

If the anti-biotic you are giving the horse is SMZ tablets (a pretty common 
broad based oral anti-biotic for horses), then a dose of 5 for a 1100 pound 
horse is WAY under dosing him.? 12 is a more reasonable one.

But, for a 29 year old horse with bad arthritis going in to winter with an 
undiagnosed "three-legged lameness' problem, I would just take this as a sign 
that it was time to end it, and not wait for the horse to become so abjectly 
miserable that nobody would deny that it is the right thing to do.? If, when 
deciding to put a horse down, you don't question whether you are doing it too 
soon...you are doing it too late (i.e. if it the horse is in so much pain that 
it is obvious, you waited too long).

If you ask me, waiting for abject misery before deciding that it is the right 
time to put a horse down is the equivalent of torturing a horse before you have 
the decency to kill it.

kat
Orange County, Calif.
:)

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