Horses are well known for their impeccable ability to get injured even in a round room with padded walls. They’re 1000+ lbs of bulk that can move really fast and with momentum like that, any surface can be a sharp surface. Not to mention many injuries come from their incredible flight response in which they don’t even consider what or who is around them, they’re going “all in” and running away even if that means scaling or jumping a wall at the drop of a hat (sometimes literally). This can create some rather impeccable injuries and those injuries are the topic of this post. Some gruesome crazy injuries that I have encountered – all with happy endings, no worries.
No pictures of gruesome wounds. Only completely unrelated horse pictures.
************WARNING************ Detailed description of wounds/bleeding (as well as healing) to follow. Dad, you better sit this one out.
Let’s start with my own personal disaster, Orion. My first horse, ever, was a middle aged quarter horse mare named Jinjer. She was the best – she would go anywhere, do anything and never spooked at anything. She was a level-headed tank of a horse. Then, when I was a teenager, I got odd jobs and finally saved up enough money to breed her. I was silly and decided to breed her to a thoroughbred to get more height and athleticism than my little 14.3h ex-barrel racing mare. It gave me what I wanted physically, a long-legged, well-built athlete with unending potential as a sport horse. Somewhere in the genetic swap, though, we lost the brain and got a skittish, scared, highly reactive animal. I sometimes thought that he was like a guy on a bad acid trip and that when the wind was blowing, he thought spiders were crawling through the grass – you COULD NOT ride him if there was even a slight breeze, or if you were wearing anything that crinkled.
His first disaster incident, I went out to feed them and found him at the bottom of the pasture, not wanting to walk. I ran to see what was the matter, and his right hock was flayed open. I gasped and cried. He was only 4 years old and had been coming along in training so well. We were planning to take him to his first show (and my first show) ever. I had been so incredibly excited, and now here he was, crippled with a huge fleshy opening on the front of his hock. Another horse in the pasture had chased him into the fence (barbed wire – bad stuff). I called the vet, they gave me a poor prognosis for his future soundness as the slice covered the whole front of the hock and cross all the joints. Once the joints are damaged or opened, it can mean life long lameness or even death in a horse. I declined taking him to the vet school as I was an undergrad at the time and had no money. The vet couldn’t do much at that point except bandage him up and start pain medication and antibiotics. I spent months tending the wound every day and over $1000 in bandage material and rechecks by the vet before it finally closed up. But, unfortunately, he was lame the rest of his life – he would drag the toe when he trotted.
His next fun adventure was when I was an intern at UGA and he was 11 years old. I had him tied to a 4×4 post that was concreted in the ground and securely fastened to the roof of the barn. I was grooming him and don’t remember what set him off, it was very likely the end of his rope hit the dirt ground with a soft “pat”. He freaked out. He threw his whole 1100 lbs backwards against his rope halter and snapped the 4×4 post about 6″ from the concrete bottom and ripped it off the rafters. And then, he took off. With the jagged post attached to his face with the rope halter.
Now, having that rope, dragging the post next to him was even scarier than the initial fright and he just kept spooking more and more the more he ran, the post dragging, bouncing around, hitting him. All I could do was watch and wait for him to stop his shear panic run. Finally, about 10 minutes later, he stopped and stood. He was breathing very hard and was trembling. Then I saw what I had feared would happen while he ran around frantically. There was blood streaming from his abdomen and splashing onto the post that was on the ground next to him. I just knew this was it, I just knew he had sliced his abdomen open and soon, his intestines would fall out onto the ground.
Somehow, though, I got very lucky and the jagged post had not penetrated his abdomen, but just made a huge gash in the bottom of his flank that tunneled a hole under the skin all the way to his hip – about 24 inches of skin ripped from the muscular layer. This wound took about a month or so before the open dead space between the skin and muscle finally filled in and the draining of serous discharge (a yellow colored fluid from inflammation and granulation tissue) finally stopped running down his leg, causing massive hair loss despite constant cleaning.
So, now I’ll move on to other impressive wounds that did not include my own horse and did not end up on the show (large chunk of muscle missing from pregnant racehorse mare’s hind). One was an Amish farmer’s cart horse who, like most, got spooked and ran between two sheds where the tin roof was a little low and sliced himself from shoulder blade to hip all the way down to the ribs. I could see the intercostal muscles moving with every breath. The farmer had packed the wound with burdock leaves and called us out immediately. It took about 2 hours of multi-layer suturing, but finally got the wound completely closed. I talked to the owner a few months later and he showed me a picture (on his phone -?-) of the horse looking back to 100%.
One early morning, I got a call that a horse had jumped a fence and had a huge wound. When I arrived, you could see most of the muscle from the upper right foreleg hanging to his cannon bone by just tendons with the radius (upper arm bone) partially exposed. I attempted to fix it with him standing, but he was too painful and I knew I would never get the lacerated muscle back in contact with the muscle origin while trying to fight with gravity, so I gave the horse enough anesthesia to lay him down. By now, though, the muscle was contracted and swollen and it still didn’t look good for getting the muscle back together. I sutured what I could along the sides for extra support and placed some large sutures in the muscles, then wrapped the whole front leg in one giant bandage. The most dangerous part of anesthesia with horses is the recovery as they are incredibly drunk and huge and trying to stand on toothpicks for legs. We painstakingly got him to wake up slowly and stand three-legged in the middle of a field with nothing but us ( 4 women) and some ropes to support him as he stood and wobbled.
Unfortunately, the sutured muscle didn’t hold and with the loss of blood supply to the end of the severed muscle, I ended up cutting away a lot of muscle and tissue, leaving a 4-6″ gap between origin muscle and severed muscle. Through continued bandaging and debriding of tissue, the wound eventually closed and the horse went on to training to become a western pleasure horse.
One day I got a call from another Amish gentleman that told me that his horse had injured himself a week or so ago and it was healing fine, but today, when he lowers his head to eat or drink, blood gushes out of his neck like a water hose. None of this sounded right or fit with any wound healing I could think of, so I packed up and headed out. When I got there, there was definitely evidence of a heavy bleed as the horse’s face was crusted over with blacked, dried blood, but there was not an obvious bleeding area. There was a wound on the right side of the neck in the jugular groove that appeared to be healing quite well, beautiful pink granulation tissue, no signs of infection, and contracting very well.
Then the horse tossed his head and that’s when a huge gush of blood came shooting out of his neck in the direction of his head. This was not old blood, or bloody fluid, this was whole, frank blood – it looked like a horror film. But as soon as he settled, the bleeding stopped again. I cleaned the area, put on gloves, and explored where the blood was coming from and as soon as I moved some tissue around and then held off the jugular vein on the body side of the wound, the gush of blood came flooding out again. I stuck my gloved finger in the hole the blood was coming from to plug it, then sutured the area closed tight. That did it. The bleeding stopped. I cleaned up and he thanked me and I went on my way.
The next day, I saw that he had called me again and my first thought was “oh no, the sutures didn’t hold”. When I got to the farm, though, my sutures were still holding, but now the thing was bleeding from the other side (head side) of the wound. The same trajectory as the right jugular vein, but this time on the head side of the gap. This one was coming from a much deeper place and I had to plug the gushing hole while dissecting out the vein and pulling the friable dead tissue away and then placed suture around that vein. Finally, both sides of the gaping jugular were closed and the horse could heal.
He ended up recovering and returning to his job as ranch horse. The only thing I could figure was that when the horse had initially injured himself (caught his neck on a jagged piece of fencing while drinking), he had miraculously twisted off his right jugular vein and didn’t bleed to death right then. Now that the wound was healing though, somehow the vein opened back up. I know what you’re thinking; “That just doesn’t make any sense” and you’re right. I still don’t know what was going on.
Horses are amazingly accident prone, but luckily, they’re also quite talented at healing. They are fantastic producers of a tissue called granulation tissue that looks like a bright pink, foamy tissue and, while very vascular and prone to heavy bleeding, will seal the wound from infection and fill the space for the skin to grow across. Sometimes, though, their amazing production of this tissue can get in the way when the wound is on a bony surface like the lower legs and will need to be gently shaved or trimmed away by your veterinarian to allow the skin to make it’s journey across. Luckily, granulation tissue does not have any nerves and the vet can sometimes trim away large amounts of the excessive tissue without hurting the horse – you sometimes don’t even need sedation – but the bleeding will look like a massacre. It’s okay, they have a lot, but PLEASE call a vet to do this or show you the proper way to or both you and your horse could end up seriously injured.
