Community educational stories for pet lovers, sponsored by  AsiaHomes Internet.  January 02, 2003

The horse makes faces at the vet

Was the horse in need of veterinary treatment?  Could he wait till the next day?  It was 7.00 pm on this cool New Year's Eve evening when the phone call came from the horse owner. I was on the way to the end-of-the-year dinner after a long day at the surgery and would rather not make house calls.  However, colic calls seem to occur at dinner time, for some unknown reasons.

"Mr McKrittle, the riding instructor told me that my horse was lying down most of the afternoon and suggested that I phoned the vet," Mrs Simpson said. "Please check him in case he gets worse in the middle of the night." There had been a bad case of a horse developing into severe colicky pains overnight and collapsed flat out the next morning as the owner waited for over 24 hours due to economic reasons. A 450-kg horse, recumbent on the stable floor, breathing rapidly was like a big man dying in front of you. You could not ignore it. 

I felt there was no hope for this dehydrated, shocked and dying horse. Yet it did survive after treatment though but the picture of it breathing its last few breathes etched into the mind of all horse lovers there. This stretched out on his right side, collapsed from exhaustion and pain  on the stable floor over the night. His eyes glazing over you, big clouds of breath sweeping the bedding in front of his nose. It was not a sight to forget and must have had distressed Peter more than anybody.    

It was hard to diagnose over the phone. The horse was standing now but he was not eating. The owner said he was in pain. 

"How did your horse show pain?" I asked Mrs Simpson. 

"He always greeted my husband and I with a loud neigh," said Mrs Simpson. "Now he put his head down, looked at his cubes and chaff and just would not eat. He was always hungry and would wolf down his feed in 2 minutes anytime you feed him."  This must be a very hungry horse which was unusual.   

Signs of colic in a horse are usually mild at the onset. Lying down, rolling on the back, a lack of interest in the surroundings and not eating or passing motions.  These are signs of colic. In thoroughbreds, delay in treatment could lead to drastic signs of abdominal pain which could be very distressful for the owner. So, it was better to examine and treat the fragile racehorse early rather than wait 24 hours later.  

The horse looked all right when I reached the stable. He put his head into the feed bin but did not nibble. He came to the front of the stall and rolled up his upper lips and rolled down his lower lips for more than five seconds showing his long 8-year-old worn incisors and pink gums. Was he going to bite me?  A very small number of racehorses do bite.  Some stablehands had their own ear lobes bitten off and I was careful.

The gelding repeated wrinkling of his lips for at least six times continuously in front of Mrs Simpson and me, all within a minute. 

Mrs Simpson explained, "He is making faces when he is in pain."  She knew him too well but this was an unusual behaviour to exhibit colicky pain in this way. Usually, they would lie down, roll and paw the ground with their toes continuously. If he was in pain, I better gave him the pain killers now.   

Had he got a fever? His rectal temperature was 38 degrees Celsius which was normal. His abdomen ballooned out to the side, as if it had lots of flatulence. 

I put my stethoscope onto his distended lower belly. If there were loud intestinal sounds, it meant that the intestines were active moving feed. Very soft sounds were heard on his left side and almost no sounds on his right side. He would have impaction colic or constipation. What was the cause of his colic?  He looked very fit as I could see that he had just a bit of ribs shown over a muscular body. No biting insects had attacked his shiny coat of skin unlike a few of the other horses in the open stables.

"He would not neigh when he saw me," Mrs Simpson said. This was not his usual greeting behaviour. Some racehorses that greet their beloved owners with loud neighing sounds.

He made faces again like people do grimace when they are in pain too. Maybe he had a headache.

Mrs Simpson said he had six colic incidents in the last two years and a veterinarian said he might be suffering from stomach and intestinal ulcers?  Mrs Simpson had given him the ulcer medication prescribed by a veterinarian. It was just not practical and too expensive to check a horse for gastrointestinal ulcers using endoscopes and detailed X-rays and barium meals. It would cost a few thousand dollars to do all these test under general anaesthesia and hence it was not usually done. 

If the anti-ulcer medication worked, the horse should not get colicky episodes. Well, it was New Year's eve and the stablehand might not have given him his medication from the container, Mrs Simpson postulated. It was hard for a stablehand to account for his medication efforts since there was no transparency and a language barrier between the stablehands who are usually not clever enough to market their efforts to the horse owners. 

"Why not dole out the medication in 20-ml syringes so that the stablehand would give one syringe a day?" I proposed. Mrs Simpson had not thought of this although she had syringes for the vitamin supplementation. She said it was a good idea. We went to my car and I gave her some syringes. In this way, both she and the stablehand would be happy.    

The anti-colic injections gave him immediate relief. His neigh would wake up all the other horses but he was jubilant. He was high as if he was on Ectascy pills. 

However, there was not even one episode of him everting his lips anymore.  His eyes shone in the darkness of the warm evening and his lips moved as if he was trying to apprehend grass or any feed he could find on the bedding. 

Then, he put his front feet on the ground and tapped the floor impatiently. First one foot, then the other. After tapping, he would claw the ground, separating the good quality wood shavings to form a line. Why would he do that?  Usually this would be a sign of pain in colicky horses. 

Mrs Simpson laughed and said, "He's was telling me he wanted to eat now, so he stomped his feet!"  She gave him his bucket of cubes and chaff.

"Do not feed the cubes," I said. "They would worsen the colic. He needed fibres best provided by chaff or hay." 

Why would she find some hay?  This was New Year's eve and each owner would have locked up their stock.  She found some hay from her friend's box,   put them inside a net and wet the hay.  Without the net, her horse would gulp all down within a few seconds. Her horse snapped at the hay trying to pull them out with his lips. Some fell onto the wood shavings on the floor. He preferred to eat from the floor, but the net was excellent in retaining the hay.    

What a ravenous horse. The way he chomped at the hay, I thought he had been starved for weeks.  Mrs Simpson assured me that he was always hungry. He would kick other horses away from sharing his feed in the paddock.

Now that he looked all right, I said good bye to Mrs Simpson. She said she would check on him later in the night. "This horse would recover," I said. "Sometimes, he could not pass urine as the constipated stools in the intestines weigh down on his bladder and once he was able to pass urine, he would be fine."

He had mild signs of colic and given pain killers, he would feel much better and live to the New Year's Day. He recovered the next day and was back to work, or to the horse, back to what he liked best - exercising amongst tall trees, sparrows, butterflies and on the green tracks of Singapore's most picturesque riding club. 

This was a case "saved" by the alertness of the riding instructor and the concern of Mrs Simpson. Nobody would know whether this horse would develop into severe colic and stressed out overnight without treatment but all horse lovers would not want to take the risk when modern medicine is effective and available.

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