Serafina
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
7am on Monday, get a text message from the BO. This always makes my heart pound because I think it will be something truly awful. Was happy to find it was only a thrown shoe. A winter shoe, with drive-in studs, and a snow pad, that was now lost in the paddock until mid-April, but still, only a shoe. AND the farrier was already coming out to the barn in another hour to shoe a different horse. Bad news, but the best bad news it could be. Farrier will just add the cost of this (whatever it is) to the next regular shoeing.
7pm on Monday, get another text message from the BO. This time, to tell me that My Wonder Horse had been fighting with another horse through, or over, the electric fencing, and had two (2) black eyes as a result. She didn't mention that he's now freaky as hell about the electric fencing. There wasn't enough light at this point for me to really assess things, and she was going to put some arnica on him anyway, so I waited until this morning to survey the damage.
He sure did have one doozy of a black eye. Far as I can tell, he got into some kind of head-butting game with the other horse, got some bite marks around the one eye, and got head-butted or bitten on the other eye, which was swollen nearly shut, with some broken skin on the lid. I put a cold compress on it for a while, and went home to call the vet, who is of the belief that any eye injury needs to be Looked At. I was kind of suspecting that anyway, so after an hour and a half of phone tag, it was back to the barn for me.
$190 (farm call, emergency visit, evaluation, and a shot of anti-inflammatories) later, I have the good news that his cornea is fine, there is no structural damage, and it's just a whopping great shiner.
I kind of don't want to answer the phone tomorrow...
7pm on Monday, get another text message from the BO. This time, to tell me that My Wonder Horse had been fighting with another horse through, or over, the electric fencing, and had two (2) black eyes as a result. She didn't mention that he's now freaky as hell about the electric fencing. There wasn't enough light at this point for me to really assess things, and she was going to put some arnica on him anyway, so I waited until this morning to survey the damage.
He sure did have one doozy of a black eye. Far as I can tell, he got into some kind of head-butting game with the other horse, got some bite marks around the one eye, and got head-butted or bitten on the other eye, which was swollen nearly shut, with some broken skin on the lid. I put a cold compress on it for a while, and went home to call the vet, who is of the belief that any eye injury needs to be Looked At. I was kind of suspecting that anyway, so after an hour and a half of phone tag, it was back to the barn for me.
$190 (farm call, emergency visit, evaluation, and a shot of anti-inflammatories) later, I have the good news that his cornea is fine, there is no structural damage, and it's just a whopping great shiner.
I kind of don't want to answer the phone tomorrow...