seven colic deaths in a week - be careful

[motorgypsy]

We're on the gulf coast of Florida - a lot of horses in this area but one vet has had 7 colic deaths this week alone. We've had serious drought and it may be the hay people are having to feed is causing problems. One of ours coliced last week but is fine because we caught it fast thanks to our very excellent horse sitter but just keep an eye on your horses and get help before they get too bad. Impaction colics are the main problem.

[Mrs. E.]

Thank you for the heads-up. Everyone seems to be doing fine here but, will be extra careful.

[dana]

Wow! Glad to hear your guy is okay and it was caught fast enough, MG's!

we are drying up something terrible up here right now. i tried to get a 50lb bag of Baker's Gold wheat bran last week and they tell me they haven't been able to get it for 4-5 months. :(

[Carol Nelson]

SALT, SALT, SALT their grain...throw a tablespoon of salt or more into their grain buckets each feeding. You can have all the salt blocks in the world in your pastures, but if they're not licking them, won't do a lick of good...no pun intended!!

Also keep your water buckets scrupulously clean...my horses won't drink out of them when they get a bit of scum in them...a little bit of elbow grease now will save yourself hundreds, perhaps even thousands of dollars later... :-?

My horses won't drink rainwater...no matter how clean it might look, dump the water after the rains, clean the bucket and refill. That is why I use the 30 gal. rope handled buckets so that I can clean and refill them frequently.
I've come by all this knowledge the hard way, believe me! :roll:

[Carol Nelson]

Want to add here too...it's a good idea to get your horses used to drinking out of a hose from the time you get them. In case of a colic, sometimes I will stick a hose in their mouths...get them to drink a bit...and then walk them for a few minutes. Come back, and repeat the whole scenario...within an hour or so I can usually have them pooping.
That's the first thing a vet will do is to rehydrate them with tubing or IV's.

Oh, and insert the hose into the sides of their mouths...never from the front...which makes it more easy for the water to go down the wrong pipe into the lungs.

[Brigitte]

We've had 6 deaths in a month on the island. We think it is because the feed stores ran out of food. I can't possibly understand how the heck that happened but it did. It lasted for about a week, one horse at the ranch got sick but that was it luckily. Some horses were finicky about eating other feed but they were ok. At the other ranches some horses colicked but we were lucky not to have any serious trouble with it. Oh and when they ran out of feed they didn't have much hay either . I had a bale which helped me with my horse. The joys of living on an island and having everything shipped to you :roll:

[Pinto Paso]

so Bridgette I am really curious - what is the "standard" feed there?
do most use bags of complete feed, what is the price of of feed for a month for a horse on the island??? I cant imagine how frantic I would be with no feed :jawdrop

[Brigitte]

As in what they get fed? Most of the horses get grain, some ranches have only grain, some grain mixed with sweet feed, some grain mixed with alfalfa.

As for the price I don't know. I pay 350 arubian florins, which is around $190 for one month of boarding. That includes stall, feed water etc. Some places are $260 a month. Where I stable is by far one of the cheapest.

The good thing is that they always order more when they have a week of feed left, so they got some. And bought another type and were giving a bit less to the horses (since it's grain ). It wasn't so bad but could have been worse if they needed to wait longer for the feed . The only horses that they didnt give less feed to were the tourist horses, the get ridden almost every day sometimes twice so they need it.

[Pinto Paso]

So I understand the grain.. but what do they use for fiber/roughage - is it actual alfalfa hay or cubes or pellets... I am just curious - and that is very reasonable board, wow.

[Brigitte]

Most ranches just feed grain. Mine only feeds grain and its up to the boarder to buy hay . Some feed grain and give hay. But hay is expensive

[Pinto Paso]

OK - that is really interesting - I dont think many of us here can even imagine not using hay :shock: I would be using condensed alfalfa for sure - either soaked cubes or pellet. Thanks for the info

[CarolU]

wow...if the horses aren't getting any more fiber then just what is in grain, it is small wonder they colic. Isn't there any grass to cut for fiber?

I wanted to ask the MGs what why the new hay is giving the horse's colic? Have they tested it or anything? It is always hot and dry here in the summer. That doesn't make our horse's colic.

[Pinto Paso]

It doesnt bother you horses there because like you said it is always hot and dry there... animals here are now going through a dramatic change. The weather is different, the feed that has been produced is different.

Arabs - in Arabia dont get much for fiber... their diet used to be milk and figs no???? but dramatic change is not good... and there is not a lot a person can do to compensate for huge weather change. hopefully everyone is afforded the luxury of being able to switch over feeds slowly.. not always an option when feed is so scarce.

[Carol Nelson]

Ok...I've been meaning to post about this for some time. Don't beat yourself over the head if you can't find the same type of hay or feed for your horses in time of drought or shortage. I've just been through three years of EXTREME drought. I had to scavange and find hay where I could and it meant from any and every supplier I could find that could sell me decent hay. I went from feeding coastal to feeding Tifton to feeding oat hay....and back again...and sometimes I'd switch them frequently. I had to...that was all I could find. The key here though is finding GOOD hay...not musty, not coarse, not moldy...
Truthfully, I didn't have as much colic as when I fed them the green lush, fluffy stuff...and I sure didn't have ANY founder.
These Pasos are bred to live on just about nothing...they survive in the meagerest of conditions. Likewise, they also founder on the best of situations.
The point of this post is this...if you CAN'T find them the best hay...then feed the best you can find...make sure it's clean, dry, and smells good...don't worry if it's brown, as long as the flakes fall apart. Smell is the cue here...if it smells bad...don't buy it.

[motorgypsy]

Why the colic? Good question. So I'll speculate here.

People are having to feed hay that is not good - last years hay

People have cut back on hay because of the price and as the vet says - "we are sand central here" so sand colic is quite common.

Very abnormally high temperatures and humidity along with the shortage of fresh grass to compensate.

The unusually high temperatures and lack of hay may be stressing the horses and contributing to the worm load which is a serious problem here anyway.

Oh - be sure to check teeth. If the horse is not chewing properly this can cause an impaction colic.

Why be careful of feed changes? Because the bacteria in the lower gut of the horse adjusts to the feed and this takes a bit of time. But if the ingredients are essentially the same which they are in a lot of feeds there shouldn't be a problem.

We've never had a problem changing hay or grain and it is possible that the psyllium fed to this horse to remove sand in this horse may have actually caused his colic since the quantity our SC vet said to use and was double the amount the FL vet says UFLA says to use. We'll never know. Will we continue to use psyllium?? You better believe it!! Sand colic kills.

The one horse we had that had a mild impaction colic - the first true colic we've ever had by the way (not counting the colts eating a foreign body) is our feral Cracker horse, not our paso finos and the problem with him is that he will eat anything and everything.

Our horses have hay 24/7 and are never out of water, are on daily wormer and a regular paste worming schedule, have minerals and salt, but we do have a horse sitter when we're not here so we never know if perhaps they did run out of water while we were gone if she got really busy and had to send someone else over who got careless??? But on the other hand it was our horse sitter who recognized the symptoms even before we did and we then watched him really closely. He always had gut sounds and was passing fairly moist manure but obviously had a belly ache. For all we know he ate a strange tree???

But just keep a closer watch than usual because next door has a colic going on right now that was caught early but this horse has never coliced in 10 years but has an impaction now.

[Carol Nelson]

Don't get discouraged either by the high hay prices. What has happened here is exactly what I said would happen. It has been raining for six months now and we have hay coming out our ears! The prices are dropping...one supplier had coastal bermuda for 4.50 a bale in the field and was begging me to come get some...unfortunately I couldn't because it was raining! ;-) But that's only a dollar away from the 3.50 that we were paying when I first moved here!
I've got a hay supplier actually calling people to come get hay as soon as he bales it...he's still at 5.50 a bale but that will drop when he's not selling all his hay...
All this is a far cry from paying 9.50 a bale less than a year ago.
All that's needed is for it to start raining again...the prices are based on supply and demand. And the demand is probably down because many people had probably dumped horses in the last few years because of the drought. Plus, as in my case, their own pastures are starting to produce again.
Hold tight and keep the faith...as my grandma used to say...this too shall pass.

[Carol Nelson]

Mg's, the main reason that you're not having the colic is probably because of this...

and are never out of water,

simply that! ;-)

[motorgypsy]

I think it's the big three - number 1 is of course water and in SC our horses have two springs to drink from. number 2 is grass hay 24/7 and number 3 is regular worming with rotation and fecal checks if you think there's any problem.

But no matter what you do there are just times when you'll get colic and the main thing is to act fast. Time is the killer. And the surgery does work. It's been two years now since Brilliant had surgery and no bowel problems at all. If anything he has bigger and better poops than the others! :twisted: :twisted:

Regarding colic surgery - find out in advance who the best and closest vets are for surgery. Some are really really expensive - more than double others, some are so far away you don't have time to get there usually and others are totally undependable meaning they will turn you down when you have an emergency without reason even if you have plenty of money to pay them and a seriously ill horse. Ask around in your area. Our closest dependable vet surgery for out SC horses is about 3 hours away. That's not good but the only other one closer will turn you down on a whim so why waste the time when they aren't as good and cost more than twice as much.

And remember our primary vet's advice - if you take your horse to a surgical facility and it turns out that it's not critical - you've spent some gas money. If you don't go and it becomes critical it will be too late and the horse will die. Brilliant would have died if we hadn't taken him to UGA.