I took this picture one day last week when life was still good. There were problems, big problems for sure, but I thought everything would eventually at least be okay. Hickory foundered at the end of November. Or probably started back in the summer but we didn't know it. We didn't actually diagnose the founder until the first part of December.
That sounds ridiculous to say. I've had horses almost all my life. I've been dealing with founder for probably 15 years. How did I (and two vets and a farrier) miss something so common in the bluegrass region. I'll to share a few things I've learned lately in hopes that they may help someone else so that maybe something good can come from this .
Actually I'm just going to get this over with. The miscellaneous notes will follow.
Hickory foundered badly and we couldn't get it stopped. For non horse people this is (on a very basic level) a horrible, very painful foot problem. There are various "causes" of founder, the most common being diet related. The rich grass in this area is pretty, but can be deadly.
T-Bone has suffered with laminitis (founder) since, I think, 2006. He's had good days and bad days and some really bad days over the years, but he's been happy and he's enjoyed being here, hanging out with his friends. His first good buddy was Handy. His very best friend was Hickory. Like Biscuit and Muffin, in most of the pictures you saw of them they were grazing side by side.
Hickory's latest set of x-rays told us what we had to do. It was black and white. What he was facing in the next few days, no one would want to put a horse through. I decided to have T-Bone put down with him. It's been an unbelievably horrible week trying to make unbelievably hard decisions.
It finally came down to quality of life. The changes we'd have had to make to keep T-Bone safe(r) would have not made him happy. And while those changes might have helped keep him from getting any worse, he wasn't really great to start with. And he'd have been alone. Some horses can handle that. T-Bone spent most of the last month standing up next to Hickory's stall.
They are buried together out behind the arena.
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Looking back, here are some things I had never heard about that we missed and might have made a difference.
During the summer we started noticing some odd bruising on the outsides of Hickory's feet. He wasn't lame so we assumed he'd bruised the outsides of his feet walking through the rocky creek. If you see weird bruising like that, call your vet and ask about testing for a metabolic disease.
On Sunday night (in November) Hickory seemed fine. The next morning he looked like he was tying up, but was also picking up one of his back feet. I called the vet. They came out that morning, checked his feet for founder, found no symptoms (hoof heat and digital pulse), decided it was probably an abscess. We poulticed it and I called the farrier.
The farrier came the next day and did find a small abscess in the "bad" back foot. He also tested the bottoms of all four feet and agreed there was no heat or pulse. We continued to treat as an abscess with complications stemming from that for several more days...
A sinking founder can present as tying up, not the classic founder stance.
Some foundering horses won't have a throbbing digital pulse or heat in their feet.
Keeping them in the overgrazed front field, thinking that was further limiting their grass, was also a mistake. A stressed (drought, over grazing...) pasture goes into "survival mode" and pushes up even more sugar into the blades of grass. A well maintained thicker pasture would have been safer.
This is only a tiny bit of information you need to know about a multifaceted disease like laminatis and I am just passing them on as a lay person, not an expert by any means. Most important, work with the best vets and farriers you can. That's one good thing about the bluegrass. We have both.
