Elizabeth Welch – Severe Foundered Horse –

Significant Sole Depth – Laminitis – IR – Picky Eater

 

John Dowdy:

Hello and welcome to another Equinety podcast. We are swinging up in the great state of South Carolina. We've got Elizabeth Welch on the coldest week. Elizabeth, welcome to the Equinety podcast.

Elizabeth Welch:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

John Dowdy:

Well, it's always a pleasure. We're always excited and welcome, welcome. So let's talk a little bit about your background. You're in the hunters and the jumper world. How long have you been doing that?

Elizabeth Welch:

Oh gosh, pretty much since I was a kid. I started out doing the Hunters and I've dabbled in some other disciplines, but I always come back to the hunter jumpers. And then I got into the jumpers when I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties, somewhere in there. And I've been kind of doing both ever since.

John Dowdy:

Well, fantastic. And one of the reasons I reached out to you specifically is you had sent, or actually had posted, I think originally, kind of a testimonial. You'd commented on one of our Facebook ads about a mare that was foundered and you had noted that you could see a definite improvement in the feet or hooves and significant increase in soul depth. So I had reached out to you and you had sent some radiographs and things, and I asked for your permission to post those as an ad, which have been running for quite some time.

John Dowdy:

And although you were a bit apprehensive about doing the podcast, I sweet talked you into it, I think. So here we are.

Elizabeth Welch:

Here we are.

John Dowdy:

But one of the interesting things, I always find this a humorous myself, because you always have people that they comment on these things and here we're talking radiographs. And there's a lot of people like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for sharing." Because they're dealing with similar issues. We're talking about a foundered horse, and as we were chatting prior to recording, you also let me know this horse, it actually had IR and laminitis, picky eater, everything kind of hit at once.

John Dowdy:

But in regards to the actual x-rays that we are showing, of course you have naysayers, which I think are in any niche out there, that are saying there is no way that these are the same x-rays. And of course, you've been doing your best jumping in there, "Hey, these are mine and I've got a whole catalog..." And yada, yada, yada. But let's go back to the beginning of what this horse... I mean, it was perfectly fine. Then one day, it started showing signs of an abscess, but tell us what was going on and what happened from the beginning and about what the timeframe was on this?

Elizabeth Welch:

So it was roughly the end of September of last year, 2019, and the horse just sort of became acutely lame, but it was really concentrated in her right front and it really just presented like a horse that seemed like it was going to blow an abscess. The horse became acutely lame and it was lame in one foot. She never presented like a laminitis horse at the time. She never looked rocked back, never was trying to get all the weight off the front feet. So for a couple of days, we said, oh well, looks like she's going to have an abscess. And we kind of treated her like she was going to have a foot abscess.

Elizabeth Welch:

Obviously, it didn't seem like it was getting better. So I had already consulted with the vet and I said, "Well, let's have the vet obviously come out and take a look at this." And if it is an abscess, see if we can figure out where it is and try to get that treatment happening. And if it's not,