Rosie update: In which I apologise for being a slacker

So I haven’t written anything on here in a coon’s age. This is mainly inexcusable, but my excuses involve work, uni, a broken collarbone, moving house, and being a lazy good-for-nothing slacker. The latter being the true reason behind my inactivity.
Anyway, many things have happened in my absence. Rose was coming along well. We went to the Hellensville PC Novice Ribbon Day (in the Geriatrics ring… Oh Lord…) and gathered in a pretty good haul of ribbons. Rosie did her best but it was all a little much. She was totally knackered by the end.
I have now moved out to my own place+land and so have her at my own home, which is totally ideal. I can now give her her medicine day and night, as opposed once a day whenever possible and I think this is indeed improving her condition. She definitely put all her weight back on and -was- looking good.
Unfortunately,  I had to go and crash my scooter into the back of a car and snap my collarbone, requiring surgery and an admonishment from the surgeon to refrain from raising my elbow any higher than my waist. As you can probably imagine this makes it rather hard to care for a horse. Rosie was fed and watered by my amazing flatmate while I was in hospital, and during the first little while after I got out. The weekend following my release she was clipped (AGAIN) and the next day my mom came out and gave her a much needed bath. However after that point, being unable to remove or replace her cover and being unable to leave her UNcovered (due to the fact that the flies around here tend to swarm upon her and drive her insane) she proceeded to live in her cover for almost 2 weeks, sweating a lot as a Cushings horse will.
This meant that when I was feeling up to it and ventured to take her cover off for the first time in a little while, I was in for a nasty surprise. Rosie now has what I originally guessed and have now confirmed (via internet research :P) to be what is basically the horsey version of dandruff.  Cushings horses are prone to skin conditions due to their hair growing so long, and them sweating so much – the combination of moisture and hair is not so good. Adding this to her mud fever which in those intervening weeks got well out of hand, I was feeling rather shocked and at a complete and total loss.
I now have the situation in hand. Now that I am able, I can groom her daily. I have also gone and bought a flea comb for my cat and have been using it on her to scrap away the icky scabby stuff that is literally all over her. It is working like a dream and is actually really really good for getting the mud fever scabs off as well. Way better than fingernails! Next step, once I’ve de-scabbed her whole body is a wash with pinetarsol dandruff shampoo, and hopefully we’ll be home free!

In addition to this somewhat annoying and distressing step backward, I have attempted to take a few forward. Rose is now on 2 additional supplements which I have been trying out. Apple cider vinegar has long been claimed to be great for Cushings, I’m not 100% sure why but I think it has something to do with metabolism and immune support. I don’t know if I fully believe it, but i’ve put her on it anyway. Falloons in Dairy Flat sells jugs of apple cider vinegar mixed with manuka honey and garlic. I figured if nothing else, the garlic and manuka honey are well known to be immuno-supportive which is definitely something that she needs. I also -just- bought a massive jug of flax seed oil (which is actually linseed oil, not flax like native NZ flax…). I mainly purchased this at the urging of my mom because of its claims at supporting healthy skin, hair, and hoof growth (Rose has recently been prone to sand cracks). However it is also supposed to support the immune system and help with joint stress worries by helping with inflammation. As well as this it supposedly calms nervous animals and does various other things which lead me to believe it may have an effect on the stress response. If this is so, it could be very good for a Cushings horse!
I suppose the results will speak for themselves in a short while, but to cut a long story short – though Rose continues to be difficult and crop up with more and more annoying issues, so far I have been able to deal with them rather easily. This lets me live in hope that I can continue to manage her condition.
She is unfortunately showing the degradation in the topline said to be common to Cushings horses and so I am going to be working her a lot on the lunge (once I have healed, myself) to try and build some of that muscle back up before I get on her again.

Has anyone ever used flax seed oil, or apple cider vinegar as supplements? And did you notice any change? Also, if anyone has any tips on rebuilding a topline from the ground up, so to speak, I would be eager to hear them!

– C.

A note on Rose’s ‘Cushings’ diet…

 

Rose scoffing feed post clip and bath.

 

The property where I graze Rose has four large paddocks, one small paddock, and access to a middle-sized portion of the neighbours’ land fenced off by their drive. They have one other mare about Rose’s size (Rose is just over 15.3hh), two cows, and a small flock of sheep. Before Rose came along a number of months ago, her new paddock mate had grazed with a small pony. They cut their own hay, and had sold of quite a bit of it, as I understand, as the two horses and two cows didn’t eat too much. Rose, however, eats a lot of hay! When living on my parent’s property, which is just over 5 acres including the house, drive, 2 garages, lawn and garden, 4-stall stable and yards, large sand arena (20×60? I think?), bedding pit, and about 2.5 acres of native bush, horses are stabled by night and turned out by day as there just isn’t enough grass for three (Rose’s eldest two children Delphi and Comet live at home). So they are fed a lot of hay! So much, in fact, that the contractor we often buy it from has expressed his doubt that we can use that much, and worrys that we are reselling it!
Anyway, over the winter, the grass got pretty low (I don’t think they’d fully anticipated how much 2 full-sized horses eat, compared with a horse and pony, especially when one of the horses is quite the piglet!) and they ran out of hay. I tried to get out there are often as possible to hard feed Rose, but in the terrible winter weather, having only a scooter to ride on, it wasn’t quite as often as it ideally would have been. As a result, Rose started to lose weight and got a bit ribby and a bit bony. My family firmly believes in keeping horses nice and plump and round (we don’t like to be able to feel ribs without having to push all the fat aside :P) and Rose, when in prime condition, is typically very ‘solid’ as judges have sometimes put it (I usually just say she’s fat…). At the time I was feeding her Mitavite Gumnuts and lucerne chaff, with some soaked copra meal along with her supplements (tonnes of garlic powder the boost her immune system, salt, vitamin powder, magnesium powder, chaste tree berry extract for her Cushings, apple cider vinegar which is supposed to be good for Cushings too though I’m not 100% on why, and selenium once a week).
Since she is barefoot, my mom and I moved her to the neighbours’ paddock which is too boggy for her paddock mate’s shod feet, and I started feeding her giant feeds as I could now leave it sitting in the paddock with her and she could take her sweet time chowing down.
Then, I took my parents to the airport and sent them on their way to Kentucky to see the World Equestrian Games, and then on to Canada to visit their families, and I had the use of the car. The first thing I did, after a bit of online research, was drive out to the feed store and have a good look around. In the end what I bought was:
–Fibre Fresh ‘Fibre Ezy’ which is a chaffage with alfalfa and rye and contains 1% or less sugar. Sugar content in feed is important for Cushings horses and so I wanted to keep it as low as possible. Also, the lusher grass in the new paddock hadn’t been agreeing with her entirely, if you know what I mean, so I wanted to get a whole bunch more fibre in there. Also again, alfalfa (and lucerne) are considered to be the grasses with the highest energy content which was in line with me wanting to fatten her up.
— More Mitavite ‘Gumnuts’ which are an extruded feed (good for old lady tummies that can’t digest grain) containing mainly barley (good for putting on weight) but with added protexin (probiotics which I have to add to Rose’s feed anyway before each worming to prevent her from colicking… She has a rather tender tummy).
— Nutririce ‘Veteran’ which is an extruded feed made from rice and rice bran. Rice, though not something I would have imagined that I would ever feed my horse, is supposed to be the easiest grain for them to digest and Nutririce is supposed to be very good for horses with stomach ulcers, or those prone to developing them. With Rose’s history of her mystery colic disease, the fact that Cushings makes horses far more prone to developing ulcers, and also that within the last 6-8 months or so she had had a mouth ulcer, I thought this would be a good way to go.
— Copra meal. Because it smells amazing, it’s full of oil to make her nice and fat, she loves the taste, and when I pour the soaked sloppy mess on top of everything else, it starts to soften all the extruded pellets while I add her supplements.
I had intended to buy corn oil also and add that to her feed with her supplements, but I couldn’t find any. And then, amazingly, this new diet worked SO WELL that I felt I didn’t need it anyway. However, now that her weight gain has slowed off a touch, I’m thinking I might get some in the next week or so, just to step it back up a bit.

How I mixed her feed was: a few big handfuls of her leftover lucerne chaff, twice that or a bit more of Fibre Ezy, a feed scoop each of Gumnuts and Nutririce, and a margarine container full of copra, soaked overnight. To that I added a heaped ‘scoop’ (probably about a tb or tb and 1/2) of garlic, a scoop of vitamins, half a scoop of magnesium, a tb of salt, about 60-80ml of apple cider vinegar (she hates the taste so I don’t use heaps), 20 ml of Bomac’s Cushy Life chaste tree berry extract (which smells BIZARRE and AMAZING), and then every Friday I add 2ml of selenium.

The results, I have to say, blew me away. Within 1-2 weeks she looked stunning! Though her topline and hindend still need a bit more padding, there are no ribs to be seen, her neck has filled out to the point of almost looking cresty, the hollows to either side of her withers, which have always been a pain to plump up, are looking plump! It makes me so happy to go out there now, especially now that I have given her a full-body clip and snuggled her into her brand new (super ugly) Snowbee ‘B-tween’ rug, and see her galavanting around like a foolish child, frolicking naked in the sun (when it’s sunny enough to leave her coverless), and scoffing down her feed with gusto! And looking soooo GOOD!

 

Even with her yucky Cushings coat, Rose now has dapples!

 

If anyone reading this has any suggestions on how you feed your own Cushing’s horse, or older horse, I would be so keen to hear them!

— C.