Small clues added context to why my new horse started drooling puddles after a snowstorm

Happy, my new Thoroughbred gelding, and I have had our share of little horse health hiccups over the past three months–call it sheer luck or catching up on 11 years of missed horse care experiences during my break from horse ownership. Or, it could be some form of poetic justice for all the researching and reporting I’ve done on horse conditions. So far we’ve had a case of shipping fever, an abscess, and one other scenario, which proved puzzling.

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Happy in the snow. Photo: Stephanie L. Church/TheHorse.com

A few Saturday mornings ago, at the end of a week where we’d been under at least six inches of snow, I got an early text to call the barn manager ASAP: Something wasn’t quite right with Happy. (Cue sinking feeling in stomach.) I called immediately, and she said my normally good eater hadn’t finished all his feed, he’d emptied both water buckets overnight, there was an inch of drool in the bottom of one of them, and his stall was much wetter than usual