Smoke

This weekend was hectic, becaue I spent approximately 20 hours working as Registrar at COSine, so I didn’t really have the time to worry about Smoke until Monday morning.

I noticed he was acting a little oddly when I fed Sunday morning. (Saturday night I was too exhausted to have noticed anything short of horse being down.) He left some crumbs of his chow after breakfast, which he never does if he has enough time to eat. However, he was about as bright-eyed as a 28 year old horse gets, so I decided to worry about it Monday. Monday morning I found email from Jack (who had considerately not awoken me) that Smoke had once again failed to clean up all his food when Jack let horses out of their stalls Sunday night.

Monday morning he met me at the gate with a little nicker, but he was obviously tentative about eating when I gave him his breakfast in the feed tub. He eats a combination of horse chow and Equine Senior which provides about 99% of his nutritional requirements, since he no longer has the teeth to chew hay or grass. Since we’ve worked hard to keep him at a decent weight despite his being unable to eat the normal diet for a horse, I called the vet’s office first thing. I suspected an abscessed tooth, since his back molars are essentially useless fragments. Although these will usually fall out on their own, sometimes they get infected in an old horse instead.

I alternated between worrying that the vet would find nothing and I would feel really stupid, or that she would find something really awful, like a tumor or an abscessed bone and we would have to put him down. (I hope that I will just come out to the pasture some morning and find him stretched out peacefully on the ground, but he is a tough old horse, and I don’t expect it will be that easy.)

Smoke wasn’t tremendously cooperative when the vet started to open his mouth, and I had to explain to him that he was under no circumstance to ever run over his vet. After that, he refrained from doing more than lifting his head as high as he could. Fortunately, she found the problem immediately: Smoke had cut his lips on his front incisors, which are still quite sharp. The damage was inside the mouth, which is why I had not seen it on my attempts to make sure there was no exterior trauma to the face or head. That makes it unlikely that he was kicked by one of the other horses: he probably just banged his mouth against something.

I felt a little silly that I had gotten the vet out to tell me that my horse had cut himself, but mostly just relieved. The lacerations are already starting to heal: and there isn’t much that can be done to help them along. She was very complementary about his weight, and I felt I had been given my gold star for the day. You can usually keep a very old horse alive on pelleted foods, but keeping them at a good weight is much harder.