That's great, for you and the horse to have a future again. Can I ask how you got to the diagnosis, just out of interest as it's not something I've come across.
Technically he was never officially diagnosed with them, because the nearest vet able to perform a gastroscopy was three hours each way and gave me an estimate of nearly £400 plus stabling to do it (friends in England had recently paid £170 for the same procedure...) - however, when he was started on a trial of omeprazole, there was such a dramatic difference in him in 36 hours that it's unlikely it could have been anything else.
How we got to that point - when he first arrived, he was just low-level slightly stroppy behaviour. A bit girthy, a bit nappy out hacking, didn't want to pick his feet up, a bit bargey, and he cribbed and windsucked (which was a bit of a surprise after the owners had said he didn't have any vices! Unfortunately I couldn't get him vetted because the only equine vet at the practice that didn't have him on their books was on indefinite compassionate leave at the time - I should have gone back for a second, more thorough look when I found that out, but didn't. Live and learn!) People who knew him said it was fairly typical behaviour and he was just a normal Welsh cob and I shouldn't let him push me around.
I still wasn't convinced, so had the dentist out (all fine) and the saddle fitter, and that's when he threw his first major paddy. I tacked him up with no problems, put my foot in the stirrup to mount and as soon as my weight went into the iron, he took off at a flat out canter, bucking all the way, and I was lucky not to get dragged. The saddle fitter, who is also a very well-respected BHSI and has represented GB, so knows a thing or two, went, 'Bl**dy hell, he meant that. Has he ever done it before?' I lunged him for a few minutes, then got back on and all was well, except he went from being lit up to total slug once I was on board.
The saddle got the all-clear and I went back to scratching my head and worrying about him. The first breakthrough came later on in the year when I started him on a teaspoonful of garlic in his feed as a fly repellent and he went from grouchy in the field to would actually whip round and snap if touched - the only change had been the garlic, I stopped it and he went back to merely grouchy. But that got me thinking it might be stomach-related. When he'd arrived, I'd gradually switched him over from the commercial mix he was on to what I fed my other horse, unmolassed beet, a handful of Halley's Greengold (alfalfa), a spoonful of micronised linseed and a forage balancer. A bit of research brought up the fact that some horses are intolerant to alfalfa, so I cut that out and again saw a real improvement in his behaviour.
I still hadn't heard of equine gastric ulcers at this point. It was about a year later, when I was getting on him from a mounting block and he repeated his take-off and buck display when I had one foot in the stirrup and one leg in mid-air over his back, leaving me with whiplash and concussion, that I started to think there might still be something wrong in the stomach area, and looked into it further, which was when ulcers came up as a possible match for his symptoms. By this time I'd also heard from a couple of people who knew him in his previous ownership that this wasn't completely new behaviour for him, so I went back through his passport and contacted all his previous owners, trying to track down when he'd started cribbing and windsucking.
He'd been with his breeder until he was four, where he'd sired a foal, then been gelded and sold to a nearby riding school, which is where the cribbing started "whenever he ran out of hay overnight". He was sold into a private home as a seven-year-old, where the lady to this day was convinced he was doped for the vetting, as the pony who was delivered to her bore no resemblance to the one she tried. She was persuaded to try some schooling livery rather than having him put to sleep and after six weeks they rang her up and said, 'Either you get this pony PTS or take him away today - he is not staying on these premises another day.' He'd been rearing up, aggressive, biting - it got to the point where the staff were wary of approaching him in the field. The owner sold him for meat money to a dealer with, shall we say, a bit of a reputation, who took him showing for a few months and then sold him as a bombproof child's pony for £3.5k to a non-horsey family, who I bought him from six years later. Piecing together what happened in that home from various friends and acquaintances, I get the feeling that the girl he was bought for was actually a bit scared of him. I'm told that she stopped riding him in the school altogether after he regularly threw a large buck when she put her leg on, but would still take him for the occasional hack with her friends, although she was happy enough to hop on him in the school when I went to try him.
Anyway, I went and spoke to my vets with this theory, and they went, 'Hm, could be - try him on a gastric supplement and see what happens.' I went for Protexin Acid Ease, which seemed to help, which gave me a bit of a dilemma. At the time, Gastrogard was the only omeprazole available for prescription to horses, because Merial still had an exclusive licence in the UK. It was around £40 a syringe and he would have needed 2/3rds of a syringe a day for 28 days followed by several months of a half-dose for maintenance. As a known cribber, insurance wouldn't cover it, and I just didn't have that kind of cash available.
At this point, a friend of mine popped up and told me that when she'd had a similar problem (she'd hit her per-condition insurance limit with her horse, who was a lovely giant that needed 1.25 syringes a dose) her vet had told her of an alternative. He wasn't recommending she use it, as it was against the law for her to import it, but he knew it worked and it cost about £1 a dose. I bit the bullet and ordered some and the change in him was almost instant - within 36 hours he was visibly more relaxed, all grouchiness gone, cribbing substantially reduced, windsucking stopped.
I did 28 days of treatment and then a maintenance dose for six months and then stopped it, just relying on the Acid Ease to keep things under control, and we were starting to get going again with the help of a lovely freelance instructor I'd found locally, until one day when she was helping me get hacking again - we were practising getting on from gates around the village and he just wasn't right, he was on his toes, he was anxious, he was tense, and it really felt like he was about to take off and rodeo again. Stopped riding him, tried to figure out what was wrong, put him back on the omeprazole, which helped, but didn't really completely solve it, and it took about three months before I realised that Protexin had changed the formula of Acid Ease and made the base ground alfalfa instead of bran! Cut that out and he went back to normal, but it was another year before I started feeling confident enough to think about riding again - and now we seem to be cracking it, finally
He's only 17, so I hope to keep him fit and able to pootle about on hacks well into his 20s and fingers crossed he'll still be trundling around the field well into his 30s
Topic: Back in the saddle! (Read 9299 times)
