Isabelle at the hospital

Oh Sara that sounds so scary - sorry you both had to go through all that - I hope that she continues to recover. hugs.x

What a horrible story :sad I have seen full torsions in dogs and it will kill the loving owner, just seeing the suffering. In dogs, is it (somewhat) breed and certainly build related. (barrel chested) Are there any known causes in horses?
I know you said post partum, and it makes sense. But not all post partum mares colic (thank God) so are there secondary factors that could contribute? Just thinking out loud, but if she had had a bigger (breed) foal, her chances of colic might have even been higher? :o
I hope she makes a full recovery. If so, she will have you to thank for it. 8-)

I have heard that larger breeds are more susceptible to torsion colics (warmbloods and draft breeds). Isabelle carried very much tucked up inside her and Solo seemed quite small... but I guess we'll never know exactly what factors led to Isabelle's colic. She always had water in front of her and nearly always had a little hay left by the time I tossed her some more. The last load of hay I got did look like it was either a different cutting or from a different part of the field because it was more coarse but that's the only recent feeding change. It was definitely from the same farmer though because for whatever reason he has three green strings and one blue string on his bales and that's what this hay has.

It's really weird, how well you take care of your horses and how random bad things happen to them. :? Such a shame. I really do hope you can breed from her again, especially incase Solo falters as a stud.

I know, it's kind of been pouring right now. The vet said when you have this many horses you're bound to have emergencies but I've had more than my share in the past twelve months or so -- two major lacerations, Inigo's fatal colic, and now Isabelle's surgery. My sanity and my pocketbook could use a break.

I think I need to get insurance policies on my busiest lesson horses. I've been lucky so far that none of these problems have been with them but I'd really be lost without them.

That's actually a great idea. I've always considered that on the more expensive horses we have, though I've never looked into it.

I have looked into it and depending on your needs, it really isn't all that expensive...just think of it as another "overhead" cost and absorb it into your monthly budget. Is insurance on an animal that is part of your livelihood tax deductable? :?: :laugh1

I'm sure that would be considered a deductible expense.

First I was thinking of insuring Diana since she is probably currently my most valuable horse, but then I realized I don't really [i]need[/i] her. It's Rocky and Ginny that would have to be replaced immediately if something happened to them.

I hope Isabelle recovers fully and does not get any lesions! Also hope this never happens again to any of your horses :ymhug:

Isabelle and Solo are home, yay!

I have to pass along the instructions of the surgeon since they contradict advice I have gotten from other breeders and even from breeding classics such as [i]Blessed Are The Broodmares[/i].

Free choice, quality hay is NOT a safe diet for a broodmare in late stages of pregnancy or for a month or two after foaling. It is too coarse and heavy and puts them at greater risk for colic -- which they are already at risk for post-foaling due to the newly empty space in the abdomen. Green grass is fine, small amounts of hay (four flakes, about 15-20 pounds, for a mare Isabelle's size), and plenty of concentrate in the form of a senior feed and/or something like Strategy to round out the nutritional and caloric requirements.

Again, this is not just for Isabelle since she recently colicked, but ALL BROODMARES. She was very clear about this.

Here are a few shots from today.

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This is Isabelle's hospital stall. MP, the woman holding Solo is the one who knew of you from school.

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This is Isabelle's team, minus the surgeon who had slipped out of the photo! I think that's her hand though.

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I took this from the window of the truck as we were driving away. Hooray for Willamette Valley Equine for saving Isabelle's life!

im releived to hear they are both doin much betetr now :)

So glad for you all ! :bounce

That's awesome!

During the late stages of pregnancy for both Ser and Lacy - they both got colicky where I'd had the vet out - is when I switched to alfalfa on the vet's advice and added wheat bran mash to their diets for the duration of their pregnancies. The vet wasn't positive it was the hay, he said it could've been the foal just sitting on something in there, but I was feeding bermuda back then. I've never taken them completely off alfalfa again because I've never again had an episode (knock on wood) though I do usually get the Timothy/Alfalfa mix now.

that is really interesting Sara!!! i feel some google scholaring coming!!! yup here i go off to google scholar.

so glad shes back! :HB
The feed actually makes sense if you think about it. I may be a "barefooter" but I've never been the kind that says ALL horses need to eat free choice hay and no grain...that's just plain silly. I do advocate feeding like that to most people I know because for the most part people have big fat lazy pets that shouldn't get anything else lol. But yes broodmares and foals and performance horses (thinking real performance like cross country and endurance and roping and things) is different. Think about the wild ones (which are definitly 'working' or they's all be extinct), just before and after foaling they are eating lots of fresh green grass full of nutrition, the stallions are eating the same, getting fat and happy for breeding and the young ones are growing on it. The old dry "hay" from the winter is all eaten up (and I've never known a horse to eat hay when there's fresh grass around anyway). Then they spend the rest of the summer eating more mature grasses, come fall they get the sugars from the frosted grass and seeds and pack on the weight for winter. Eat "hay" all winter, are hopefully not too thinned down by spring and back around they go.
I do think it's risky to keep a horse on summer fat 12 months a year, I think they should trim down at least once so they dont keep the same old fat forever. But a horse on grain and fresh grass that's in trim shape, working and in every other way healthy is probably the best performance horse.

Now how you do the "fresh grass" part without a pasture I'm not sure :lol: But I supose you just find really high quality hay (watch out with the alfalfa, some horses dont do so well on it and there are some kinds of grass hay that are every bit as good. The bermuda I found in Alabama, I kid you not, tested as 19% protein :shock: ) The important thing would be the constant flow. Not feeding in meals but also no freechoicing untill they get fat. I've been looking at some different slowfeeders and some people came up with good ideas here:

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Not that I need it, I'm having trouble getting mine to eat enough hay for a good weight as it is, I need better hay badly. I did speak with someone who makes a slow feeder ball thing that I like and I think I'm going to get some when they make the mold for the one that hold oats, I think they'll get more out of it if they eat it slower.

[quote="Morgan"]...and I've never known a horse to eat hay when there's fresh grass around anyway.[/quote]
I need to introduce you to Tigre. :roll: I toss out a pitchforkful ([i]about a half flake[/i]) every day and she cleans it up. I'm just trying to get rid of it so I have room for fresh summer hay for this winter.

Isabelle and Solo look geat! I really expected her to look much more drawn down coming out of the E-hospital.

My Pacific NW grass is so low-quality that actually my horses do eat hay even when they have access to grass. I had Texas and Bree on a grass paddock for a while to eat it down and figured I'd skip their hay meal once I got them up to the point where they were on the grass paddock for a significant portion of the day. Nope! They called and called until I tossed them a couple flakes and hoovered up every bit of it. My hay comes from central Oregon and I call it atomic hay. My horses will eat it before they eat alfalfa. The quality is extremely high.

And actually substituting quality hay for grazing is what got me into trouble. She wasn't truly eating free choice since she was always done with her hay and ready for more when I went down to feed breakfast. I was feeding her about four times (her usual two flakes morning and night, and an additional flake here and there to keep her eating) plus she was getting about 7.5 pounds of concentrate that was, incidentally, exactly the type the surgeon recommended -- Senior and Strategy. My error was too much hay. I was supposed to have cut back on hay and upped the concentrate. In the absence of quality grazing, such as in my region, upping concentrate seems to be the safer option for broodmares.

Heidi, I expected her to look more drawn down as well! They starved her for several days and now she is very aggressive about her food. :shock:

WHOA! is that small square bale? do you know how much in lbs she was eating per day of hay? our horses eat a bale a day (a bale being approx 40-50lbs around here) which would mean your horse was eating less then 1/2 a bale by my standards of 5-6 flakes total a day and she should have been eating less? My pony was eating 10lbs of grain and a bale a day until he got tubby and i wouldn't consider feeding less then a bale a day for a full size horse or i would risk loosing some wooden fences and half my barn walls. my guys get about 14 hours of chew time in a day to eat their bale which is broken up into 2 or 3 feedings....obviously right now they are eating grass, but i am talking about in the winter.

maybe your flakes are larger?

[quote="all that sass"]WHOA! is that small square bale? our horses eat a bale a day (a bale being approx 40-50lbs around here) which would mean your horse was eating less then 1/2 a bale by my standards of 5-6 flakes total a day and she should have been eating less?
...[u]maybe your flakes are larger[/u]?[/quote]
I believe that is the case.
I grew up on the West Coast where everyone baled hay into 3-string/wire bales that weighed an average of 100# to 125# each. Hay was sold "by the ton", about 18-20 bales per ton for between $80 to $125 depending on grass, oat, sudan or alfalfa hays. Here in Georgia, it was a rude awakening to find NO hay is sold by the ton. Instead, it is sold by-the-bale, and bales are about 45#. This means, a ton of *this* hay would be 45, 2-string bales. Now, at $2/bale, this would come to about $90/ton. In CA and WA I paid between $80-$125/ton. However, people *here* sell these dinky 45# bales for $3 = $135/ton or $4 = $180/ton and I feel their nutritional quality is considerably less than the West Coast hay I had been purchasing all my life. No value at all.
So. To save my pocket book from taking the hit of buying oodles and oodles of over-priced bales I need to find room to store...I buy 4-5 super-large *round* bales and just fork it off into the manger, bit by bit.

[quote="Sara"]Green grass is fine, small amounts of hay ([u]four flakes, about 15-20 pounds[/u], for a mare Isabelle's size), and plenty of concentrate in the form of a senior feed and/or something like Strategy to round out the nutritional and caloric requirements.[/quote]

i pay 2.50/bale delivered for first cut tim/alfalfa or i can pay 3.50/bale for second cut (which i don't typically buy because its TOO leafy) i have seen over 4/bale in this area and these are 40-50 lb bales. i can also buy 4x4 round bales for $25 each I am hoping to have my 12 acres cut and baled for me this year but that means i have to get it in my barn *By My Self* which is horrifying LMAO but will save me at least a dollar a bale.

My central/eastern Oregon bales are four-string and approximately 100 pounds each. Each flake is four to five pounds. If I fed 50 pounds of my hay a day I would have to roll my horses instead of ride them!! Holy crap I can't even imagine!! My biggest horses get four flakes a day plus varying amounts of grain and are all fat and happy. Most of them get zero grazing. None of them get any grazing at all from November to April or May because grazing is nonexistent.

I had increased Isabelle to six or seven flakes a day and that's what my vet was saying was way too much. She also advised that feeding local hay (which I never do) is just giving your horses something to do (chew and chew) but it has no nutritional value.

I just bought two tons of hay, by the way, and paid almost $700 for it so all you people with cheap hay better count their lucky stars! Those two tons will last me two weeks. :((

Oh gawd, I just read again what you are paying for hay and I can't even get STRAW for those prices. I did a happy dance when I found straw for $4 a bale this spring!

My hay works out to over $17 a bale.

15-20lbs makes good sense. A horse is supposed to consume 2% of it's body weight in forage alone. For a 1,000lb horse, obviously that's 20lbs (Belle probably weighs more than 1,000). Then factor in grass and they should have even less hay. Some horses will eat themselves silly on hay.

FWIW: Lacy is on stall rest with only about an hour per day grazing (to get her out of the stall while I clean it). She is allowed free choice hay since she isn't getting grass. Apparently she doesn't stuff herself as she is eating almost *exactly* 20lbs a day. She weighs almost exactly 1,000lbs. For us that means she's going through a square bale every two days (our bales weight about 40lbs).

Sara did they say anything about Belle's hydration? I know sometimes they attribute some colic episodes (in addition to whatever the main cause) to horses that don't drink much. Does she drink alot or can you tell?

I am tripping on the amount of hay you all feed! Whoa! A bale a day?

She drinks a TON of water. Of course by the time they saw her she was terribly dehydrated but she had been sweating for hours, so profusely that it was running off her belly and she was leaving wet spots wherever she went down.

Remember she is lactating so her caloric requirements increase dramatically -- but those increases should have been in the form of concentrate, not hay. :( Now I know, and I'm telling everyone I know who breeds. Remember also that we can't really count grazing here (unless there are several acres of pasture for every horse) so we have to feed all forage as hay.

[quote="Jenks"]I am tripping on the amount of hay you all feed! Whoa! A bale a day?[/quote]

:? :oops: Same here. Holy...... Mid winter, I start feeling a bit worried about my hay supply because I go through one bale in 5 days. :o I feed almost no supplement. Just local (coastal & bermuda) hay. Summers are grass, zero hay. Hay-time is from November until March, sometimes into the middle of April.

With that being said. I realize that Sara was feeding a young mother. 8-)
I am glad that she is back home, picking up her life at your barn again.

i am so confused right now!!!! what do your horses do the rest of the day??? that's it! this calls for an experiment!!!!!! i may need to keep noble in and see how retarded he gets on only 20lbs a day. i bet he eats 20 lbs of timber starts cribbing and weaving all in one day!!! LMAO

so, how much time do your horses spend eating?

:rofl Sass

Vneer: I feed a little over half a bale per day to one horse in the winter here. Of course our winters are probably much rougher than yours. They need the food just to stay warm here.

As for what they do all day... eat. Some sleep a short bit of the time, but most eat pretty much non stop. I have sat with the horses at the barn a full 10 hours before and it's rare to see them stop eating. This is very good for them though. Horse's stomachs are designed to have something going through there almost constantly. Being empty for very long can cause ulcers (ala poor racehorses with no grass, limited hay and ridiculous amounts of sweet feed :roll: ).

[quote="accphotography"]Vneer: I feed a little over half a bale per day to one horse in the winter here. Of course our winters are probably much rougher than yours. They need the food just to stay warm here.[/quote]

They must! (be much rougher) And my one bale per 5 days is with constant turn out (but naturally, grass does not grow here in winter either)