Ponyin' Around

We are grieving the loss of Joe on Friday, Jan. 27, 2012. He would have been 28 years old on Feb. 13. 28 is considered old for a horse, but Joe was an Arabian, and a magnificent black Arabian as well. He was built to last. He had great big bones, excellent feet, and lacked the typey dished Arabian face. Dished faces are associated with sensitivity in a horse (according to Linda Tellington-Jones), and true to his straight profile, Joe was pretty bombproof, not prone to fretting and anxiety. He could lope at will, even up through the last week of his life.

What did him in was a gas colic caused by a blockage of fecoliths, the passage of which caused a rupture of the large intestine. He was humanely euthanized on the spot.

This year we had been nursing Jacob, next Lena, then Joe as they coped with various serious age-related ailments. Up til Joe's passing, we thought we were three for three. Two out of three is not good enough, yet they, and we all, will have to go on sometime--to complete the cycle of nature and support new life and/or to another existence here on Earth, or to our eternal reward.

How to compare the hole in the heart left by a horse with the pain attendant upon the passing of a close companion such as a cat or dog? We spend more time with small pets because they can live inside with us. Dogs, especially, give us unconditional love and actually crave our companionship, whereas most horses can take us or leave us. But horses are monumental, dignified, and just wild enough to remind us that they were meant for another existence--one that we have made impossible by capture and by encroaching upon most of their liveable space. So there's always a certain regret when we regard the horse; a consciousness that we haven't done well by them, even when no work is demanded of them.

Upon regarding Joe's noble form, laid out upon the ground, I was struck by how powerful a blow his passing seemed--but also how even the tiny, final sigh emitted by a mouse after its last breath is no less important, but goes unlamented.

I can't go on with this. Joe, we loved you. We always will.

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We hope it's true that bad things happen in threes, because if so, we've just weathered the third health crisis among our most senior citizens. Joe colicked yesterday, a gas colic. With him being an older Arabian, a stone was suspected. Stones occur when a horse has ingested a small foreign object in the course of feeding, and the gut coats it with a protective layer which builds over time, much as an oyster converts a pesky piece of sand into a pearl. In the case of a horse, the gut can be blocked if the stone is not passed while still small.

While no horse vets are based close to us, we are lucky to have a few good ones willing to travel the distance to us. They're all cool with the fact that while one is our main vet, when he's not available, we may call upon the others to step in. With Jacob's, Lena's and now Joe's recent medical dramas, we've relied on the combined wisdom and skill of three vets.

After tubing Joe and administering probiotic-rich yogurt and warm water, along with a gas-reducing medication, the vet drew on a long plastic glove and did a manual inspection of as much bowel as he could reach. He was able to feel the presence, somewhere in an adjacent loop, of a hard rounded object. Such a find is unusual, as stones are usually deeper in. The vet pronounced his discovery an enterolith or a fecolith (fecalith?), which would be a hard spherical ball of compressed fecal matter.

This morning Joe had his third shot of banamine to keep the pain under control, and a half-cup of metamucil mixed in with his senior feed. Then, sometime during the early afternoon, he laid an egg--two eggs, to be exact. They were each the size of two baseballs jammed together. Needless to say, Joe is much more comfortable now, doesn't need any more banamine, and is eating like a champ. The giant fecal balls are museum pieces, and will be on display at our upcoming open house, along with our enterolith collection, a tray of stones of all sizes found in the pasture over the years.

Joe will turn 28 years old on Feb. 13, and he's still going strong! Go Joe!

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Yesterday evening Lena showed some of her old spunk, becoming less easy to dose with her oral meds, and this morning she showed a renewed interest in food! This is the first upturn since she first choked the evening of Jan. 2!

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Alas, poor Lena. Apparently she aspirated some of the broken-up clog of food when she was tubed by the vet. She had spent a week in the pen, away from the leftover hay of others (too rough on the throat). But she refused to eat any of her senior food, remembering that she was eating that when she choked. It's like when you get sick and throw up--whatever you had been eating last is repulsive. So she was standing there, losing weight and getting distressed. Another vet call, diagnosis: pneumonia.

So it's lots of shots for Lena (2 antibiotics, 3 injections per day for more than 2 weeks) with oral banamine for the first three days. And now that her throat has had a week to heal, she's allowed out to nibble hay--which she does, increasingly, but with her elderly dentition, it takes more than hay to keep her weight on. She's losing weight. Perhaps when her lungs are clear, her appetite will come back full force, and then we can tempt her with senior food.

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Not another one! Last February Jacob survived a marathon episode of choke (see previous post). Tues. Jan. 3, Lena, who will turn 28 on Jan. 21, choked on her wet beet pulp mixed with soft senior feed. Her teeth are as good as the vet can make them, we soak the beet pulp first and keep smooth river rocks in it to slow her down, yet it happened. Luckily her case resolved more easily than Jacob's did. Injections were administered for pain and inflammation. The vet was able to break up the clog with the nasal tube, and she spewed mightily, all over Katsuro! Her feed will be even soupier now, and I guess a couple more river rocks might help. She'll have bute for three days, and she can't even play at eating hay for seven. She has to stay in a pen within the field during that time. Joe hangs out near the pen, waiting for her to come out and be his mare again, even though she's the boss.

These oldies take some coddling, but they deserve it! 

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