I'm down to one horse now. My third horse is the last of the four horses I have owned. He's 27 this year, and the last couple of years have had some health challenges in addition to his long term issues of heaves, PSSM and PPID (aka Cushings). These three are still well managed through a precarious balancing act of care, but it won't take much to bring the whole thing down.
I started this blog years ago to provide some insight around making the decision to euthanize my horse, hoping that people who needed it would find some support as it wasn't something widely discussed at the time. There is more discussion around quality of life these days. There are also many more veterinary options for care, resulting in many more questions about how much we should do, and when should we say enough. It's not a decision made in a short period of time. Considering the factors, options, the individual horse, and our own situation occurs over a long period of time. Barring some catastrophic emergency, the decision to euthanize builds slowly over weeks, or months, or sometimes years.
This is the first of several posts looking at that slow build.
Here I am again. It is spring, and I'm evaluating how my senior horse handled the winter. We have real winter here - snow, ice, and freezing temperatures for months. This creates problems for horses with mobility, strength, and balance issues. Brat has several mobility concerns.
On September 30, 2022 Brat injured his stifle. He spent the winter healing and was doing very well when we got over an inch of rain in one weekend late April 2023. The rain turned the spring mud to sucking mud, and Brat tweaked his stifle again. Over the next year he went through periods of healing and setbacks, not helped by a series of abscesses that followed a bout of cellulitis. I couldn't tell if the lameness was caused by the stifle or an abscess.
In the summer of 2024, between abscesses, he was close to sound. I realized that he was less sound on days where the footing was a little slippery. After consulting with the vet, we decided that this was probably as good as the stifle was going to get, and some strengthening work would benefit. Brat was feeling good as he happily went out for walking with a little bit of trot trail rides. It was during those rides that I noticed he was dragging his left front toe as he swung that foot forward. He was losing some range of motion in the left knee.
Xrays showed some very minor arthritis of the sort one would expect a 26 year old horse to have. The vet recommended Osphos as a whole body arthritis treatment as an alternative to just injecting the knee. After doing some research I opted to try it. Osphos takes a month to show effects, and it can be done every six months. Brat got his Osphos injection in early August, and in September I felt he was more comfortable. He did well through the fall, but in the new year I thought he was losing the benefit.
Five months out of something that can be done every six months, and takes a month to take effect seemed like a questionable benefit. I talked to the vet about alternatives and ended up trialing an oral joint supplement for six weeks. I didn't see any benefits, and in the third week Brat walked away from me in the paddock twice. He usually comes unless the footing is bad or he's not feeling good, in which case he stands and waits for me to go to him.
Exercise is a critical part of the management for Brat's PSSM and heaves. He wasn't really interested in going for exercise walks, and I had to give a lot of encouragement to keep him moving at a reasonable pace. He was increasingly uncomfortable about picking up his hind feet, and standing in the barn - symptoms I had blamed on constant abscesses last spring. Now I begin to consider if perhaps it was, and is, the stifle.
Snow, ice and mud are not particularly stable footing. As last fall's rides showed, he is more uncomfortable when he must stabilize his feet with his body - specifically the fragile stifle. I noticed increasing trouble in January, three months ago. April is typically varying degrees of muddy, making a total of four months with a noticeable degree of pain. There will be mud, ice and snow again in the fall. The question looms large. Have we reached the end of the line?
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