07/31/2026
Well, horses will be horses, right?!
I had a friend once who said “Horses are essentially Faberge eggs, that then try to kill themselves”.
I came down to the barn for an early hay delivery (finding good forage is another story!) and there was blood all over my mustang’s stall..
He somehow ripped a chunk of his lateral quarters off- from the coronet band down to about 15cm off the ground .. no apparent damage to the coronet band, but the lamella are a squishy glob of very vascular tissue. After calling the vet and setting up a place to work so we could clean his wound, we flushed the area with saline and also some betadine solution.. he stood well. I then trimmed off some of the hanging loose corium/lamella and placed a sterile telfa pad inside. Wrapped with vet wrap - almost like a pressure bandage keeping the tight wrap on the hoof horn. Then I wrapped higher up looser. Then I have these little hoof boots to protect the wrap and pad. He stopped bleeding for a bit.
Changed the pad out having to sq**rt saline in because it was struck to the tissue (wait - isn’t telfa not supposed to?) and then it bled again. In some ways this was good because the area looked much cleaner. I repacked and re-wrapped. There appeared@ to be some pressure that was pushing out the tissue - what I would call prolapsing. We don’t want that so essentially a light pressure bandage appears to be keeping it where it should be. I made his paddock a little smaller so that he couldn’t dig again or rip more hoof off (still haven’t quite figured out what he did! And today is a new day.
Goals - keep it clean, start “treating” with my Visum light, and get the keratinization to start. One that starts filling in I can fill the hole with a pad and wrap his foot in perfect hoof wear. However, we have a ways to get there..
Heading up to get more sterile saline from the vet and give him lots of love and scratches..
!
