Page 28 - Canada Spring 2021

EQUINE HEALTH
This mare developed a fever and a swollen neck after an intramuscular Banamine shot. Incisions were made to open up the area for drainage and to get oxygen into the infection, since bacteria thrives in damaged tissue with no oxygen supply. The mare survived, but with scars and some muscle atrophy.
and opening up those areas; you could tell by the way he acted,” says Randall.
“We kept him in the clinic about a month and he ended up sluffing an area in his left thigh, leaving a hole as large as half a watermelon where all the muscle was gone. His sciatic nerve kept functioning, however, and his hip joint was okay, so he survived and was able to keep going.”
Randall recalls.
Some horses aren’t this lucky. Randall tells of another horse that had an infection at an injection site-on top of the gluteal muscles (rump area). “There was noticeable swelling. I gave the horse antibiotics, loaded him
in a trailer and took him to the clinic and he was dead when I got there,” Randall says.
The first ivermectin deworming products for horses were injectable and there were several incidents of clostridial infections with those. “Here at our clinic, we probably used about 3,000 doses of it during the time it was available
as an injection, and it was my favorite dewormer. We always gave the horse an injection of penicillin in the same region, at the same time.” This eliminated the risk because penicillin is very effective against clostridia.
“We never had any trouble with those injections, but
the company later went to an oral product partly because of injection reactions, but mainly as a marketing tool because it was easier for horse owners to give it orally,” says Randall.
history of reactions,” he says. “It was a Friday when the owner called. The horse had
received the vaccination early
in the week. He always got
stiff and sore after vaccination, and the owner had been doing some massage and chiropractic work on this horse. When they called me, it didn’t sound good. When I walked into the barn, I could smell that horse – a sickly sweet odor put off by clostridial organisms. The horse was standing out in the arena, holding his left hind leg up. The whole
leg was cold and swollen, with gas bubbles under the skin all the way up the leg,” recalls Randall.
“I got him started on antibiotics, clipped his hind leg from hock to croup, and figured out where the major problem
areas were. We cleaned those up and made a lot of incisions to open them up, let the gas out, and start drainage. The tissues were dead and rotting. We didn’t have to use any anesthesia to make the incisions because he had no feeling at all in those tissues. These were incisions 8 to 12 inches long,” he says.
“We asked about euthanasia. The horse was insured for a fair amount of money and I told the owner the chances of surviving this infection were poor and it would be reasonable to euthanize him, but we’d have to call the insurance company first. The owner told me to save the horse
if I could. So, we got the horse loaded and took him to our clinic. He was already starting to feel better, just from the antibiotics
28 SPEEDHORSE CANADA Spring 2021