Blue Horse Charities has stepped up the campaign for passage of legislation to ban horse slaughter with a strongly worded letter and a full-page advertisement on the back page of the Nov. 8 edition of Daily Racing Form.

In a three-page letter mailed to industry organizations, constituents, and the media, Blue Horse Charities alleges the American Quarter Horse Association

Since December 2001, the donors have been vaccinated multiple times with the WNV vaccine. The company had to prove purity, safety, and reasonable expectation of efficacy to have the plasma conditionally licensed for treating WNV.

Nearly three months after they were selected from among several other horses and viciously beaten, two Arkansas Quarter Horses, three-year-old buckskin filly Quarter Horse Puddin’ and five-year-old sorrel mare Fat Girl, are alive but remain seriously injured. The horses were attacked Aug. 6 in the town of Guy, while owner Patrice Swan was gone for 90 minutes helping a neighbor with a

Yankee, a 30-year-old bay gelding, is one fortunate survivor of the rampant California wildfires that have plagued the San Diego and San Bernardino areas, and other parts of the state, since late October. Owner Carol Prida’s home in Wildcat Canyon burned and fell on his stall Oct. 26, before he could be evacuated. Everything plastic in Yankee’s stall (including his buckets) melted from the

The raging California wildfires that have killed 20 people, destroyed about 3,400 homes, and blackened approximately 552,713 acres, also had a profound effect on the equine population. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of horses were evacuated from the fire’s path, by owners with their own trailers, volunteers who rushed in from as far away as Los Angeles (to the San Diego area), and commercial

Mare reproductive loss syndrome (MRLS) has been a primary research project for many veterinarians and scientists since it began causing early and late term abortions, sickness in foals, pericarditis (heart problems), and uveitis (eye problems) in horses in the spring of 2001. Manu Sebastian, DVM, MS, a resident in Veterinary Pathology, and a PhD student at the University of Kentucky’s Gluck

Even as the California fires were beginning to rage out of control, Sebastian Heath, VetMB, PhD, Dipl. ACVIM, Dipl. ACVPM, senior staff veterinarian for USDA-APHIS, Emergency Programs, was discussing the consequences of animals in disaster situations to an audience at the University of Kentucky.

Rural hazards range from natural disasters to epidemics (such as the foot and mouth diseas

Sulphadiazine and pyrimethamine are used in combination to treat equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM). These drugs interfere with folic acid (folate) metabolism, a vitamin essential for survival of the causative protozoon Sarcocystis neurona. In human patients, these drugs can cause folate deficiency. Signs of deficiency include bone marrow suppression and ulcerations of the tongue

In decades past, colic treatment was actually a misnomer. “Treatment” consisted of waiting out the colic while offering sedative-like drugs to dampen a horse’s misery. Either his body healed of its own accord, or he succumbed to death from overwhelming pain and shock. Veterinarians were reluctant to euthanize a horse with colic because one could never tell if he was going to make it or not. A

No one test can reliably diagnose septicemia (systemic infection) in a foal. The clinician must wait for the results of blood cultures, which can take days. However, preliminary studies of a blood protein called serum amyloid A (SAA) have shown it to rapidly increase in response to inflammatory diseases. Until now, fibrinogen (soluble plasma protein) has been used as an early indicator of