Bumps and Bangs of Life
- Topics: Article, Physical Therapy
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It looked bad. My daughter Barbara and a college friend purchased a 2-year-old registered Quarter Horse filly (Casey) last year that had 30 or so days of training on her. They wanted to give the filly some additional training in order to sell her and pay for some school expenses. She was going great. Could do the Quarter Horse jog and the English trot. They tried her over a few low jumps, and she loved it. Good manners, but with a little spark.
Then came "the ankle." Casey came in from the field one day with a bump on the inside of her right front ankle. No lameness. Vet at the boarding farm said everything seemed okay. Nothing outstanding on palpation. Poutice her, and keep her working. But the bump didn’t go away. Casey was perfectly sound. She came to our farm in Kentucky before college started, and the ankle worried me. We had our vet, Carol McLeod, DVM, X ray the filly. The concern was a fractured sesamoid, but the X rays came back clean. Is there a tendon or ligament involved? Ultrasound exams showed nothing! It’s a "fibrous mass" that will not affect the filly’s soundness. Treat the puffiness, put her back to work, and sell her without worry. The moral of this story is: Be careful of bumps and bangs, but keep in mind appearances aren’t everything. I’ve seen some of the best equine athletes in the world in a variety of disciplines, and none was perfect.
So, if you have a chance to get a nice, "gently used" ex-racehorse, some other performance athelete, or even a young horse like Casey, have your veterinarian check him/her out. But don’t worry too much about appearances; you might get a "diamond in the rough
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Kimberly S. Brown
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