Diagnosing Equine Shoulder Pain
Sometimes perceived shoulder pain is a symptom of real pain elsewhere. In a series of 59 horses presented to a specialty orthopedic referral clinic for suspected shoulder problems, only half actually turned out to have pain in the shoulder area. Severe pain in the lower leg, usually foot-pastern-ankle area, is often misinterpreted as shoulder pain. This is either because the owner or trainer sees that the horse is unwilling to bring the leg forward freely, or because the shoulder area muscles are tense. Shortening of the stride is typical for any cause of pain in the lower leg. The tightness of the muscles comes from is involuntary splinting against the pain. Actual arthritis in the shoulders is rare. Ponies and miniature horses may be born with shoulder dysplasia, similar to hip dysplasia in dogs. Like the hip, the shoulder is a ball and socket joint. A large knob of bone on the top of the humerus (upper arm bone) fits into a cup on the lower edge of the scapula (shoulder blade). With dysplasia, the cup is shallower and flatter than normal. This conformation can lead to anything from arthritis caused by the head of the humerus having more motion than normal inside the joint, to actual dislocations. This causes a severe lameness that is sometimes treated surgically by putting plates and screws or nails across the joint to prevent movement. These animals are then usually pasture or breeding sound (although since it is likely genetic they really shouldn’t be bred).

Horse Coat Supplements
If your diet has good protein levels and is balanced and adequate for minerals, but you’re still having coat problems, your first step is to replace the fats lost when grass is baled into hay. If you’re going to feed fat, make sure it’s a good source of the essential omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, in a correct balance. Everyone wants to show off a shiny horse, and that’s why coat supplements command a large share of the marketplace. Poor coat quality is often the first sign of either inadequate nutrition or physical problems, such as an illness or parasitism. That’s because the horse’s body assigns a low priority to keeping the coat supplied with key nutrients. We’re going to look at products that address skin and coat from a nutritional standpoint in this article. (We’re beginning a field trial on specific color-enhancing products, which will be in an upcoming issue.)

Winter Horse Care
If your horse is going to be outside most of the time, you'll need to have a shelter that protects him from the prevailing winds and from precipitation. Horses with access to a shelter will lose 20 to 30% less body heat than those without protection. You can also keep a blow dryer and several heavy towels stocked for times when they don't come in out of the rain and cold until it's too late. If this is a group situation, pay close attention to the herd dynamics to make sure all horses have access to the shelter. A horse low in the pecking order is both most likely to be chased out and most likely to need the shelter. Equip your shed with hay racks even if you have a separate hay bunker, for times when the weather and/or ground conditions are particularly severe. It’s important that the shed have good drainage and be accessible for mucking. Sheds should be bedded to encourage horses to lie down. A horse that is lying down loses less body heat. While you wouldn't call most barns warm in the winter, compared to living outside, horses in barns are considerably less challenged. The temperatures are at least more consistent and adapting is much easier. And there’s usually no wind-chill factor inside the barn.

We Want A Breakable Halter We Can Lead In
More of us are turning our horses out in halters than we used to, and the reasons vary from boarding stable rules to catching our horses in the dark when we return home from work late to anything in between. While we remain firm in our belief that turning a horse out without a halter is best, there are times when you need to be able to quickly and securely grab ahold of a loose horse in the field without having to put the halter on. However, a horse should only be turned out in a halter with a safety or breakaway feature. Decades ago, an all-leather halter was considered the safest choice, as leather will rip under stress and nylon won’t. But nylon halters offer convenience—and colors—and they’re less expensive. Nylon also doesn’t stiffen after a rain and doesn’t require saddle soap. We soon saw nylon halters with leather crowns, which were put in place with the belief that the leather would break in an emergency. It will, but it takes quite a bit of force to rip a leather halter or crownpiece. (Clearly, you shouldn’t turn your horse out in an all-nylon halter, because the only thing that might break is the hardware.) In 1996, we tried our first halter with a leather fuse breakaway feature, set at the throatlatch buckle. It was from BMB Tack, and it definitely set the standard for years to come, handily winning our 1996 and 2003 trials. Unfortunately, BMB is no longer offering that halter in its line.

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You Can Save Money With Bedding Pellets
For the last half a century, U.S. horse owners and stable managers have chosen mostly between two types of bedding—straw and shavings. (Yes, other bedding types are available in certain regions, but not across the country.) Straw’s big drawbacks have always been three: First, it’s time-consuming to clean, requiring you divide the stall into sections and pick through every strand. Plus, it’s kept best if the manure is picked out several times a day, making it most suitable for a barn with a dedicated staff. Second, it’s dusty when put in the stall and not terribly absorbent either. Third, it requires a lot of space to store it, especially for a large barn, space you’d probably rather use for hay. And today, it’s expensive as it’s not a profitable product for most farmers. All those factors made shavings became popular as the American horse population (and housing industry) began to grow 50 years ago. But shavings can also be quite dusty (although it’s far more absorbent than straw), and storage has always been an issue. The least-expensive way to get shavings is to have a dump truck drop a load near your barn, but you have to keep that pile from blowing away or getting wet. Bagged shavings are easier to store and keep dry, but more expensive. Plus, in some areas removing waste is an issue because the wood flakes don’t break down quickly enough to suit gardeners or nurseries.

The Crusader Horse Fly Mask Marches On
With all the variations in fly masks, we can’t think of any reason not to have your horse wear one. You can get masks with or without ears, in a long or very short version and in a soft material or a firmer PVC-mesh, which will do a pretty good job to withstand any rubbing or chewing that might occur when your horse is turned out. However, you may have some trouble deciding which mask is best for your situation. We can help. PVC is a durable choice for a fly mask, as it withstands rubs and abrasions better than nearly any other material. However, the mask needs eye darts or another method of holding the material away from the horse’s eyes. We don’t like stiff masks that squish the horse’s eyelashes, let alone rub his eyes. And we don’t want the horse’s vision obstructed by poorly placed or designed darts. The Kensington Bug Eye mask’s new design places a puffed-out bubble of PVC over the eye area, which we thought was a brilliant idea. If Kensington Products can figure out a way to stop it from pressing inward when the horse rubs the eye area, they’ll be right on the money.

Stall Mats
If you’re thinking of using mats as a cover-up solution for stall-flooring issues, forget it. Mats must lie flat to function properly and prevent the joints of snap-together mats from becoming loose. Without a level surface, you’ll have continual problems with the mats shifting, curling and even moving about. Mats can be placed over concrete, asphalt or a base of "fines," meaning finely ground stone with pieces no larger than 1/8 inch diameter. Fines are necessary over a clay/dirt base for better drainage. Fines can be used over irregular surfaces to fill in the gaps to a uniform height. A five-inch depth is ideal. After adding fines, they should be wet down, then thoroughly tamped or rolled, and checked to be sure they are level. Stall preparation instructions are slightly different for the Promat system, which calls for a somewhat coarser gravel.

Quality Hay Alternatives for Your Horse
The advantage of a complete commercial feed is that protein, vitamin and mineral concerns have been addressed for you. The ideal way to use them is as their name implies—as a complete diet. However, you need to consider how the feed compares to what the horse was getting before. If little or no grain was being fed, choose a complete feed with low-fat, high-fiber, high-feeding rate as above. Mold growth increases exponentially with time, even in hays that were initially well cured. In addition, the breakdown of the leafier tissues contributes to fine hay dust, a significant respiratory irritant. This crumbling often results in the most nutritious portions of the hay falling to the ground when you open the bale or load it into the rack. Molds and bacteria insidiously rob the hay of protein and of carbohydrates untilmoisture levels drop too low to support their growth. Vitamin A levels plummet in old hays, too, and you may need to increase vitamin and mineral supplementation.

Vacuums Get Right To The Skin
With the right attachment, a vacuum will easily remove deep-down dust and dander from your horse’s coat. There’s not always time to give a bath, and some of us simply give up trying to remove that deep dust from long coats the stuff that seems to magically reappear as soon as you touch your horse. And which one of us doesn’t dread spring shedding? The right horse vacuum can solve all these problems and more. In fact, we think once you’ve used one, you’re going to always want it on hand. Each of the vacuums in our test were surprisingly quiet. We didn’t have to shout to hear one another, the way you do with a lot of shop vacs, nor did the horse seem to mind the noise. The vacuums also had similar-feeling levels of suction. Some told us the horsepower, others the amps, and others the waterlift that’s apparently the catch when it comes to comparing the power from several different vacuums. Waterlift measures suction power and is rated by how far the vacuum can lift water up a one-inch diameter tube.

Focus Your Deworming Efforts
Deworming by the calendar may cost you more than necessary and make future deworming more difcult by building drug resistance. Resistance to dewormers is extensive and officially includes almost all deworming drugs except ivermectin and moxidectin. However, with isolated reports of possible ivermectin resistance beginning to appear in horses, as they have in cattle for many years, we’re skeptical about no ivermectin resistance. For resistance to develop, the parasite must be exposed to the drug one or more times. For this reason, many experts now advise that healthy adults should not be dewormed on a regular schedule of every X number of weeks. Simply rotating deworming drugs on schedule doesn’t stop resistance from building. You have to break away from the calendar-based rotation deworming schedules. By doing so, you’ll avoid unnecessarily exposing the parasites to the dewormers, which would increase the likelihood of resistance.

Equine Vaccines Move Into The 21st Century
After decades of relying on outdated technology, a few manufacturers are moving to bring equine vaccines up to par. In the year 1798, Edward Jenner discovered that deliberately injecting healthy patients with material from a patient with cow-pox could protect them from getting smallpox. Unfortunately, they often got very ill, and his contention that this odd practice could protect against smallpox was not widely accepted. In 1879, Louis Pasteur discovered that injecting chickens will an old, weakened culture of the bacteria that causes fowl cholera protected them. A Pasteur Anthrax vaccine followed in 1881. In 1885, Pasteur successfully prevented rabies after vaccinating animals with a vaccine made from dried nervous system tissue from dogs that had rabies, and saved the life of a nine-year-old boy bitten by a rabid animal by giving him a series of injections of the rabies vaccine basically the same protocol that is still used today. Building on these discoveries, many researchers began to come out with techniques for vaccines to protect from a wide variety of diseases. The pros far outweighed the cons, but side effects and reactions to these still crude vaccines were significant. With the advent of killed vaccines, serious side effects dropped considerably. Unfortunately, the protection provided by the killed vaccines is often inferior.

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