Slobber-gate: What Caused My Horse’s Excessive Salivation?

Have you ever had an out-of-context horse health issue that puzzled you and/or your veterinarian? What did it end up being?
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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.

https://instagram.com/p/0c2OpVONBY

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

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Written by:

Stephanie L. Church, Editorial Director, grew up riding and caring for her family’s horses in Central Virginia and received a B.A. in journalism and equestrian studies from Averett University. She joined The Horse in 1999 and has led the editorial team since 2010. A 4-H and Pony Club graduate, she enjoys dressage, eventing, and trail riding with her former graded-stakes-winning Thoroughbred gelding, It Happened Again (“Happy”). Stephanie and Happy are based in Lexington, Kentucky.

One Response

  1. re: Slobber-gate: What Caused My Horse’s Excessive Salivation?

    I actually had an aged Arabian mare a number of years ago that, as a friend so delicately put it, "dropped buckets of spit".  You’d be working around her as she stood quietly, her expression all innocence, and suddenly she’d start workin

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