A Recovery Story
We own a 26 year old grandson of Doc Bar. He was a gift at the age of 21 to my son from a beloved honorary uncle. Said uncle's son had outgrown Supes - he is a small child, and yet he rides bulls, ropes, you name it. He needed a faster, bigger horse.
Superman is a small QH, about 14.1/14.2 hh, still very catty and fun to ride, but last autumn, his teeth were floated. After that, he started dropping weight, looking poor, and he wasn't eating, lots of slobbering. We took him to a different vet, this one an equine specialist, not just a 'large animal/livestock vet', and found out the last vet had took his teeth down to 10% grinding surface, had left some too long so they were tearing up his gums and tongue, and others' were floated uneven.
My rage at the other vet knows no bounds. At our horse's age, he has no more tooth to grow out. What he has is all he will have now until the end of his life. The equine vet was able to do quite a bit of gentle correction work. She was able to get him back to 25% grinding surface.
He has cost us a fortune, between buying him a snazzy blue plaid winter coat last year, giving him weight gain amounts of Purina Senior Feed and rice bran, twice a day; a flat back bucket full of soaked alfalfa cubes once or twice a day; topping the feed with a senior compound supplement, and keeping a horse formula protein/mineral/fat supplement tub in his pasture for him to have free choice of, but the Old Man is worth it. He's an equine version of the Old Man from Pawn Stars, he's taught many a kid, many a teenager, and a few adults how to ride, and he loves my 19mo old granddaughter - he's the only one of our 7 horses that lowers his head for her to hug "Shoopes!" face every evening at dinner time.
He's been good to us, and he deserves the best we can offer. Below are pictures from August, after he'd taken yet another nose dive in his weight in late June/early July, had packed on quite a bit of weight by August (Yet you could still see his spine and ribs, his shoulders and hips are sunken, neck still too thin), and.... a picture from last night.
This weekend, he gets to participate in some equine therapy for a young lady who needs healing for a grieving soul. They're going with us on a trail ride Saturday, and it will be his first real ride since last year (as opposed to putzing around the house) early this spring.
Submitted September 25, 2019 at 02:59PM by ladyofthelathe
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Horses/comments/d99ifv/a_recovery_story/?utm_source=ifttt
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