Chico has a swollen leg!

Today I planned to take another bareback ride on Chico, since the last time was so fun. I pulled him out of the pasture and we goofed around for a while. I took a picture of Chico's wound that's all healed up. The scar is the horizontal line. The vertical line is just a bit of hair shaved off where another horse bit him.


It's healed up way better than expected. This is what it looked like back in April. The vets tried to stitch it up, but it was a day old by that point and the stitches pulled out. He ran into the barn and slipped on a pallet that the hay bales had been on.



Then I showed him the mule deer hide in the back of Todd's truck (his dad shot one a couple days ago). Chico was quite unsure about that.


Then I noticed that his left hind leg was all swollen up! It was the "cankles" look that I saw on him at this exact same time last year, only this time is only one leg. It doesn't feel like there is any heat in it, and his gaits weren't off at all. Interesting that it'd be just this leg, because it's the other leg that has the scar on it from the cut, and also the recent poke with a tree branch in the woods.

This picture is his right leg...not swollen.


Here's his left leg, all swollen! But no heat and doesn't seem tender.


Because he didn't seem lame, I took him for a two mile ride anyway. I thought maybe the movement would help the swelling go down. He did well. We walked, trotted, and cantered, and I could never feel any off-ness in that leg.

When we got back, I looked at his leg again, and the swelling really did go down! Here's the left leg, almost normal.


Then I trimmed all four feet. Here's a before picture of his left front.


Here's an after picture of his left front. I primarily took down the heels and trimmed the frog up.





I noticed that I think he has a case of thrush hidden in the clefts of his frog (which explains his slight tenderness on rocks when he usually has the most imprevious feet). The yellow color in the picture is from iodine that I used to treat his frogs. If you look closely, you can see bruising in the white line at the toe. You can also see actual separation between the hoof wall and the white line (not directly at toe, but off to the sides a bit). This is separation growing out that occured back in June when all three horses were thrown out onto lush June pasture without any transition at all (I couldn't be out to do it because I work, and no one else thought it was important enough to do it...thankfully no one actually went lame. They just all have this major dish in their hoof walls with separation. It's almost all grown out now though. Lately I've been seeing this bruising in the white line at the toe on all three horses, but I think that it is probably due to the separation growing out and not anything that I am doing wrong.

By the time I was done trimming (takes me hours to do one horse), Chico's leg had started to look more swollen again from just standing around, so I gave him some bute and put him away. Hopefully he'll be better tomorrow.

Here's a picture of Todd scraping the hide of the mule deer. He's going to tan it and make something out of it. He's done this before.


I apologize for the funny picture arrangement. I'm not sure what happened, but I don't feel like fixing it.