Pet talk

It was very hard to watch on TV.  The report that Barbaro was finally put to rest after his long battle with a shattered rear leg was all I thought about yesterday.  Horses are so fragile!  In some ways it is almost a miracle that they live and reproduce at all. 

But medicine has really come a long way.  Just a few years ago, horses with broken legs were immediately put down.  These days more and more horses can be saved from even the most serious of injuries.  But we still have a long way to go.  Just the make up of a horse makes surgery very difficult.  While it was said in veterinary school that you could spit inside a dog while spaying it and the patient would live, horses are extremely sensitive to infection.  Therefore the surgical suite must be totally aseptic and the surgeons hygeine must be impeccable. 

Then after knocking them out, they can not lay down too long because their own weight will collapse their lungs making breathing impossible.  After years of grazing on dirty grass, horses can pick up a hundred pounds or so of sand and dirt in their GI tract making recovery a crap shoot.  Will the instestines twist with all that sand in them while the horse is thrashing around comming out of the sedation?

Once awake, the horse has to stand in order to digest their food and breathe properly–thus making any leg problem difficult.  The other three legs take on the additional weight.  A normal horse has a structure in its foot called a frog.  This is a sack that is located on the bottom of each hoof.  When a horse walks, the frog strikes the ground (contracts) helping the pooled blood make its way back up the long legs and into the heart.  When a horse can not walk, the blood doesn’t get back to the heart efficiently and their legs swell.  This is what is known as “stocking up”.  That is why Barbaro’s other legs were wrapped up all the time and they were frequently filmed hand walking him.  It was important to keep him moving as much as possible.

After any severely traumatic event, (fever included), or even after a carbohydrate rich meal,  blood vessels in their hooves can expand and this causes the horse to begin to actually loose its hoof.  This process is similar to what happens when you hit your fingernail with a hammer and the nail falls off.  In horses it is just as painful.  Only when a horse loses a hoof, he is usually put down. 

Given all the factors against a horse recovering from any kind of surgery at all, it is a miracle that any do.  But thousands of horses every year survive broken legs, bowel surgery, and cancer treatment.  Yes, they still shoot horses these days, just not quite as often. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.