Just Rotten

From what I've seen online in all my digging to figure this out, Rain Rot they lose hair. River Rot they lose skin. I've also seen Mud Rot and just about every other rot imaginable. So which is it?  Maybe a little bit of all of them.

So far the mare is still swollen and her skin looks like it's all burnt. I wrapped her legs twice and the first time, as I took her big puffy pillow wraps off, they were stuck to her skin in places and the smell of rotted skin was bad. The second time I wrapped her legs, I wrapped them in paper towels first, then the pillow wraps, then the standing wraps.

One of the girls watching me asked if I was seriously using paper towels? Yes. Yes I am. The paper towels would absorb any moisture but when it comes time to take the wraps off, if needed I could rinse the paper towels away. I have another roll in the tackroom and they worked well actually.  

Kat is starting to lose skin and hair and is only swollen behind. He is losing skin almost all the way up the inside, but only from the hocks down on the outside of his hind legs, which doesn't make sense at all.

The filly in their pasture fares the best and although she has a Lot of pink skin, she is already almost thru the process and it doesn't look like it will turn into scratches so that's a good thing. Scratches are a total pain in the ass to deal with!

The gelding in their pasture? I feel so bad for him. They are hardly ever out there and I never see anyone treating him. Poor guy is always there at the gate wanting to have someone dote over him, treat his legs and give him some meds to ease the pain. (Yes there has been inquiries to buy him, but the bottom line price is in the "Crazy money" amount.  Besides that, they are seriously confused or misled about his age. By about 10 years under kind of off.)

Mine have been on low doses of Bute daily and I have been hosing the mud off their legs and spraying them with antiseptic. I have also been soaking the horses in fly spray. I know the mosquitoes are going to be bad from all of this. I also ordered up a dose of wormers since they have been eating outside a lot and who knows what washed thru the field in the high waters.

It's going to take time and it doesn't just happen overnight. The road to recovery is sometimes a long, painful and tedious one.  The filly is almost thru, with very little scabbing left on her legs to shed. My little ponyman is still shedding skin and hair very slowly. Their stalls were dried up enough they could be stripped, left a few days to dry out, packed with sand and bedded with 2 bags of shavings each.

My mare is still out in the pasture as her stall was bedded pretty deep and in need of stripping before the flooding. Now it's super wet, super heavy and digging it out as well as leveling it, will be quite the chore. It was still drying when the horse in the stall behind her, broke the waterer off the first night back in and flooded the 5 stalls their owner occupies. The gelding's owner is part of their "clan" so he remains out in the pasture too although his stall wasn't flooded by the water tub incident.

Because my mare is out, she has dropped weight again. I'm trying to get her back inside so she will again have a healthy amount of feed to snack on at will. She has the pasture and a round bale to share with the gelding, but she sweats a lot being outside. A few people have asked me what she gets and why she's so thin?  For one thing, she doesn't handle change well. When horses moved into or out of the barn and the 'energy' changed, she lost her mind, began pacing and dropped weight in nothing flat. We all know it;s easier to take weight off a horse than it is to put it back on them. Wish we could say the same, right?

She's definitly not an easy keeper! Besides a slow feed hay net stuffed full of coastal grass, she gets a half scoop of 12-8, two scoops of senior feed and about 4 scoops of alfalfa pellets. The 12-8 is 12% protien and 8% fats. It's a pelleted feed like the rest of everything else she's getting. The alfalfa pellets, it seems like a lot to put in front of her all at once, but she has gotten to the point of nibbling on it and picking at it to where I can dump it all in once a day and she still has some the following day when it comes time to add more. She has only coliced once or maybe twice in the 13 years I've had her and the last time was about 9-10 years ago.