R.I.P. - Jasmine

Yesterday, Jasmine was standing for a lot of the day. We knew that she hadn't eliminated yet, but thought maybe for some reason she was feeling better.

This morning she is gone. It's been sad to see her in pain and struggling with her plight. We went down for one last time to see her. She was sooo bloated. We feel that perhaps this could have been prevented. Of course, the last resort was surgery and that is usually only 50% effective, and a financial issue as well.

After researching online about it, because that is what I do when there are issues I don't understand, "colic" in horses is pretty prevalent. It is preventable. This situation occurred perhaps from Jasmine eating the cattle feed, which was laced with the cattle medicine and too coarse for her digestive tract. It impacted her "cecum" or maybe it 'twisted' her intestines. We felt a more aggressive treatment, maybe enema would have helped, the vet said the cecum is hard to reach from either end. Looking at the illustrations, it's so. There is lots of info and personal experiences on the internet. Some are success stories and some not so successful. Chalk this one up to "not so successful". Everyone worked so hard and way into the cold and windy nights hoping to make a difference for the horse and for the girl who owned her. And if you know me, I get way too attached to animals, this one really pulled at my heart strings, and I even did a portrait of her for granddaughter months ago, which endears her even more.

I have to get out to the studio today, in hopes it will help me 'let this event go' from my head, but keep her in my heart.

There's a 'winter storm warning' in effect this evening through tomorrow morning. They say 'ice'. Gotta get to town and get milk for us and gasoline for the generator, just in case.

Sick Horse

My neighbor's granddaughter owns an Arabian horse. This morning she came to our door, because the horse was lying down and wouldn't get up. Our house is between her house and the horse's area. G. was leaving for the dentist soon, but we both went down to see if we could help.
The experience I have had with horses is that my neighbor in the mountains had a mare that got colic from eating some 'weeds' that horses shouldn't and got 'down' and had to be treated very quickly by a vet.
When we got there the horse was moaning and rolling on it's back. It didn't look like it felt very good. It stood up briefly and then it's back legs collapsed and it sort of fell down again. It was very sad and disconcerting.
By that time grandma had arrived and the vet was on his way. The vet assessed the situation and we determined that the horse had gotten into the heifers food the day before. It has medicine in it for calves, but is deadly to horses. To verify this, I ran back to the house and called the Co-Op where the feed was from and sure enough the medicine was in this feed. Someone had delivered these heifers yesterday and put the horse in the wrong corral, and the horse helped itself to the cattle feed for a little while. The vet gave the horse a shot, encouraged it to get up but it wouldn't. He said the horse would have to get up and be walked for at least 1/2 hour, before he returned at noonish to see how she was. The other women and I got the horse to stand, I had to finally 'spook' the horse from the side, nothing else was working. Grandma had to get to work, I had nothing going on, so I helped granddaughter walk the horse. We walked her for about 1/2 hour, you could tell she was definitely feeling better. We put her back in the pen and she stretched out her stance and kept opening her mouth real wide, like she was trying to belch, it looked like those scenes I can remember from "Mr. Ed" the talking horse, when the horse's mouth moved around as it supposedly talked. Then, she looked as though she would lay down again, so back out we took her for some more walking. The vet came around 11:00 and listened to the horse, Jasmine's belly. He said it sounded better. She looked better and hadn't returned to the ground. Still, she is making those funny faces with the mouth open and stretching out, probably to let air pass through. So, I think she is going to be OK. We are going to check on her again about 1:30. I knew that one had to act pretty quickly on these things, good thing there is a traveling vet in the area and that he came so quickly. Granddughter thanked me over and over again. She was so afraid she was going to lose Jasmine this morning. But....time will tell. We collected the morning's eggs from the hen house, she gave them to me, and I accepted but told her "that's what neighbors are for"...to help when needed.
Colic is a scary thing, especially in horses!