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Re: [RC] leg wrap survey - Merri MeldeI come from the racetrack, where wrapping legs was a given. But that's with horses that were stalled 22+ of 24 hours of the day. It worked better on some horses than others; some horses natually had tighter legs than others. On those that didn't, you could often see the difference in a tight leg and a filled leg if you didn't wrap them overnight. We left them on for 24 hours, but never more, even if we just took them off to re-rub and re-set the bandages. We used different things under the wraps - furasin sweat, or mud, or mud sweat, a rub-down with alcohol or just dry wraps - you got a feel for what was best for each horse. Sometimes standing in ice boots then wrapping. I did meet a physiotherapist who was against icing legs - she pointed out the circulation in horse legs is minimal enough, why would you want to make it harder by constricting blood vessels? The circulation is what carries the fluid out.Translating bandaging to horses that are not stalled every day (i.e. endurance horses) - If my horse is going to be tied to a trailer after a 25 or 50+ mile ride, I would rather put standing wraps on all four legs. If the horse is going to be turned out in a decent sized paddock after a ride, it depends on the horse, but I don't feel the wraps are as necessary because the horse is going to be moving around on his own. Does it really matter if your horse has filled legs in the morning? (Because if he's being ridden the next day, it will likely work itself out.) I don't know. I just prefer to have cool tight legs in the mornings, and for a standing/penned horse, I find it helps. Also if your horse cuts or skins a lower leg where it's obviously going to blow up, a furasin sweat works wonders for that. Does it take away from the natural inflammatory process, and is that bad? I don't know, but I use furasin sweats for those dings. We also found out that if you put the plastic wrap outside the cotton wrap (which is against the leg) you get a better, longer-lasting moist sweat on the leg. I also agree that if you can't put a wrap on correctly you might be better off not doing them at all, because you might do more harm than good. On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Susan Cushing <5sus@xxxxxxx> wrote:
-- www.endurance.net/merri www.TheEquestrianVagabond.com http://theequestrianvagabond.blogspot.com/
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