Lori Ganacha - Severe Laminitis - Thin Soles -

Now happier and trimming every 3 weeks

 

John Dowdy:                 Hello and welcome to another Equinety podcast. This week we're swinging out to Berthoud, Colorado, and talking with Lori Ganacha. She's got an eight year old mustang that came down with some laminitis and was her first time dealing with something like this. I'm excited to share this one with you because we've been getting a lot of phone calls and emails with horses with hoof issues and thin soles and all this type of stuff, and this is going to be the perfect, at least in my opinion, perfect podcast to touch upon these things and what this mustang has gone through. So without further ado, Lori, welcome to The Equinety podcast.

Lori Ganacha:                Thank you, John. It's good to be here. I'm excited to share my story.

John Dowdy:                 That's great. Well, we're excited to have you. I believe it was back in June of this year, right around the 13th, so it's been about four months ago, you had reached out to us and I believe you and I spoke directly. You were telling me some things that were going on with your mustang. Why don't we just step back in time a little bit and share with everybody what you were going through at that time?

Lori Ganacha:                Okay, John. Well, I've got an eight year old mustang, as you said, and last May, approximately five, six months ago, he had, we had, I had what I would consider the perfect storm for a laminitic episode with my mustang, who has never had that problem before. I'll tell you what the perfect storm was. It was the beginning of spring. There was green grass coming up. They were out on pasture. I was limiting their pasture time. I've got two other horses as well, but spring grassing I've always been aware of, so it's not a full blown thing. I try to acclimate them to it. So they were on spring grass. He got his hoofs trimmed because he's a barefoot horse, and, without speaking unkindly about the farrier who did it, it was very, very, very short trim. To the point where he was lame on all four feet right after the trim. So that was the second part of this perfect storm.

The third part was we got a horrific spring storm two days later that was a combination of snow and rain and cold and nasty, windy ick. So that was the third part, and the fourth part of this perfect storm, I think, was the spring hormonal levels in this mustang. He came out of that storm because there wasn't a lot we could do during it. I got the vet out here, and he was doing okay in the mud because he had a little bit of insulation and a little bit of cold on his feet, but we took x-rays of this lame horse and he had rotated slightly in his coffin bone.

As I said, his feet were just ridiculously short trimmed and my vet basically said in a nutshell, "The next two weeks is going to be critical for him. I can't give you a great outlook on this, but I'm not going to say it couldn't be, but I'm not going to do that for you." So we also tested him for insulin resistance, which he was, and he was put on a pretty strenuous diet. She told me he's by no means obese but he needs to drop about 40-50 pounds just to take some pressure off of his feet. So that was where we sat there. I was going through this two week period, trying to keep him as comfortable as possible. I did get him in some soft ride boots, but he was pretty sore dude, let me tell you. He ended up going in his stall for the most part. Because he was so sore, we didn't want him to do anything silly if he had the opportunity to do it, like think he feels good and go run and buck or anything.

Plus he had the soft ride boots on, which was keeping him a little bit less mobile. So the outcome was not looking completely rosy. I, John, have never dealt with laminitis in a horse before,