00:00:00 Lillian
Hi, this is Lillian. I'm here with April love.
00:00:03 Speaker 1
I heard that one of your clients had a horse that colicked, and I'm wondering about what people can do when a horse colics and how to prevent it in the first place.
00:00:14 April
Hi. Yeah, one of my regular clients. So, I offer bodywork sessions, if they stay on a regular monthly program it's 60 to $70 a month for horse tune-ups and her horses do dressage.
00:00:32 April
And they get turned out and they have a beautiful environment, but all of a sudden she had a mysterious colic on this 12-year-old horse, and he just went down.
00:00:41 April
That, and of course, it's always late at night, and no trailer.
00:00:46 April
And so the vet came out and they were working on them and giving them Banamine and all those things and trying to get stuff moving.
00:00:54 April
They were saying nothing's moving. No gut sounds, the colon was displaced or something, and they were going to have to do surgery.
00:01:03 April
So, then they're running around, and they borrow this two-horse straight-load trailer that was way too small for this warmblood.
00:01:12 April
And they're using ropes and things and trying to get him in.
00:01:16 April
And he's more stressed trying to get crammed into this small, little trailer.
00:01:20 April
But before all that happened, she had my book, Horse 101 and Horse 102. But it wasn't at the barn. In my Horse102 Holistic Alternatives, which is available on Amazon for like $9. In the beginning of the book, it says to print this off, laminate it and have it at the barn. Because when something happens you get emotional. Everything goes out the door and you forget what to do.
00:01:48 April
So, you know like having Banamine in the fridge and anytime the vet goes to your barn for another horse, if your Banamine is expired or whatever, you know, grabbing another one, you don't want to do Bute for colic, you want to, you know, have the muscles more relaxed.
00:02:09 April
I tell everyone to have Epsom salt around because the side of the Epsom salt container says for constipation, put a tablespoon of Epsom salt and warm water and drink.
00:02:20 April
So, you can syringe that to the horses, because by osmosis, the saltwater goes in the stomach, like if you give too many too much on electrolytes, they'll have diarrhea.
00:02:34 April
Well, when your horse is colicking, you have an impaction.
00:02:36 April
They can't burp.
00:02:37 April
It's got to go out the other way.
00:02:39 April
So, is it a piece of plastic? Is it because they're not chewing well or they're wolfing their food? But whatever is in there that's blocked is fermenting and creating the gases, and it's just a huge bellyache.
00:02:53 April
So, they go down and try to roll to move things around. If they flip over on their back, they can actually twist that intestine.
00:03:01 April
So that's why they always say don't let the horse roll, walk them.
00:03:05 April
Sometimes I'll ask them to trot so that they can kind of bounce up and down.
00:03:09 April
So, the first thing that I do is do the warm saltwater.
00:03:14 April
If I can I also grab DoTerra DigestZen oil.
00:03:19 April
You can keep it in the barn. It never goes bad. Heat doesn't hurt it.
00:03:24 April
I open up their lip, I just pour a whole bunch into the side of their lip.
00:03:27 April
It tastes like black licorice.
00:03:29 April
And then I put it on my hand and saturate the belly button because it can actually go up through that intestinal lining up through the belly button.
00:03:39 April
You can try it in your belly button because it is a people thing and they do have chewables for people that help get rid of acid reflux, constipation gas, and bloating so then I'll rub it on all sides of the horse's belly, and we'll do my yoga, butt tucks, some belly lifts.
00:03:59 April
So, I go on one side of the horse right in the earth area and you get all the end of the horse and you just lift that whole side of the ribs up.
00:04:09 April
So, you're standing pushing with your back leg so that you're just kind of shifting everything up gently and slow.
00:04:16 April
And then I'll go to the other side and lift those ribs and then I'll ask for the belly lift in the middle where we just scratch and I'll do the butt tuck where they roll up behind.
00:04:26 April
And then you want to combine that so you have someone doing the butt tuck while you're doing the belly lift and it brings and it moves the whole large and small intestine rolling anything forward, left side, right side.
00:04:38 April
Just trying to get whatever's blocking in there to move so the gas can move.
00:04:45 April
So, and then we'll walk him around and you know, of course not let him eat.
00:04:49 April
Maybe try a couple of steps trying to get things going and then I'll do some more DigestZen
00:04:55 April
And we've gotten a lot of horses out of severe colic with that.
00:05:00 April
So, in this instance, all she remembered was the belly lifts.
00:05:04 April
She didn't have any probiotics.
00:05:06 April
Sometimes we'll do a liquid probiotic, I like the dynamite one and it's called DynaPro.
00:05:15 April
If you have DynaSpark that works as well, it's a natural electrolyte that's molasses.
00:05:21 April
So instead of having to do the Epsom salt syringed in water, which you're probably going to wear a lot of it.
00:05:28 April
I've had to lift the horse's jaw up with a big CC and syringe it in their mouth and then hold their mouth shut, put my fingers in wiggle their tongue so that they swallow and you end up wearing most of it.
00:05:41 April
Where the DynaSpark is salty molasses-based, and they eat it.
00:05:47 April
They actually like the flavor, and you're not going to end up wearing it.
00:05:51 April
So, I'm getting that from my client.
00:05:54 April
She's going to have the doTerra DigestZen
00:05:57 April
She's going to have the DynaSpark and the DynaPro on hand in case it ever happens again, and she's going to print and laminate that sheet I have of all the steps you do while you're waiting for the vet because the vet was I think 3 or 4 hours to come out.
00:06:12 April
Well, it was 1:00 o'clock in the morning when they were trying to get him in the trailer, and his buddy is screaming back in the stall.
00:06:20 April
You know he's not wanting to get in, the trauma of all that, and they haul him to the vet and they had opened the back door without signaling to the person to untie him and he shot out backward and was still tied.
00:06:34 April
So, he struggled, broke the rope, fell down in all of that turmoil, reset his own gut and he came out and just wanted to start eating.
00:06:43 April
And then they called me and say, OK, you need to come fix the horse again when he gets home.
00:06:49 April
But you know, sometimes just putting a horse in a trailer.
00:06:53 April
I prefer the open-stock style.
00:06:56 April
They poop.
00:06:56 April
They're getting nervous.
00:06:57 April
They're going to be hauling somewhere, so just walking them into a trailer.
00:07:02 April
Sometimes we'll get the bowels moving after you've done all this.
00:07:05 April
So, we've added something salty, you know, to get some diarrhea and some loose stuff kind of going and moving and we've lifted all the ribs on the left side, the right side, we've combined with two people, belly lift and butt tuck.
00:07:20 April
There is a way that you can do it by yourself.
00:07:22 April
You do one side and then you go and do the other side.
00:07:26 April
You know, we've walked them around.
00:07:27 April
We've trotted them.
00:07:29 April
Maybe a little bit more DigestZen, a little bit more DynaSpark.
00:07:34 April
It's just, you know, we got to keep that moving and you got to think what's going to relieve the gas pocket that's in this tummy that just keeps fermenting and growing.
00:07:42 April
So just don't let them lay down and roll.
00:07:45 April
Don't hose them.
00:07:47 April
I saw one client housing a horse.
00:07:49 April
Cause it was all sweaty, but then it kind of went into shock and it couldn't dry and it was just shivering from head to toe.
00:07:55 April
So that was just adding to severe intestinal cramps and pain.
00:08:01 April
You can get Banamine either in liquid form or paste.
00:08:04 April
You have to talk to your vet about that, and giving it orally or giving a shot, whatever your comfort zone is, you know, but those are the first things that you want to get going. My horse he'd eaten some dry pellets in his stall on a rubber mat.
00:08:20 April
He was pawing at the rubber mat.
00:08:22 April
And I'm like oh no, here we go again.
00:08:24 April
It's a three-day holiday coming up, my arm is in a cast, and I can't put him in the trailer.
00:08:31 April
What am I gonna do for my horse?
00:08:33 April
Showing all these signs of colic?
00:08:36 April
And so, it's just going through all those steps to help them get out.
00:08:40 April
And then once they're out of the colic you need to keep something going through their gut because there's a reason they didn't just, you know, eat one thing, there's something that's building up in there, and a lot of times that can be they call it enterolith or stones.
00:08:57 April
So, when the horse is young, if they eat a piece of plastic or baling twine and they can't digest it, the body starts sending calcium to surround it to protect the body, like making a pearl in an oyster.
00:09:11 April
And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:09:13 April
And those are the horses that are older that look like they have this really low-hanging tummy.
They either have a lot of sand in there or a lot of stones developing and it can be more than one and they won't like to canter either.
00:09:27 April
So, our preventative program is to do Psyllium pellets a couple of times a year to keep sand out and to feed apple cider vinegar, it has to be raw organic from the mother.
00:09:39 April
And it's proven to help break down stones, enteroliths, excessive calcification, side bone, ringbone, arthritic knees, and hocks.
00:09:49 April
It's also anti-cancer.
00:09:51 April
You can Google all the benefits of raw organic apple cider vinegar and my horses. It was somewhere between 1/4 of a cup and 1/3 of a cup a day.
00:10:01 April
So, the yoga that my program is a five-step yoga that you'll find on my YouTube channel, Holistichorseworks, all of those stretches move the whole intestines and people notice when they do the butt tuck and the belly lifts that the horse has a really big manure passing after.
00:10:19 April
So, it's really helping the gut stay healthy.
00:10:22 April
When you're doing this yoga and rolling their body up like a cat and keeping everything moving.
00:10:28 April
A horse just standing out in the pasture, retired is going to have low-lying areas of sand or rocks in their gut that's going to be a blockage someday.
00:10:37 April
So, do the yoga feed the apple cider vinegar and you can find my Horse 102 Holistic Alternatives book on Amazon. It’s $6 on Kindle and $9 in paperback. And they make great gifts. You can get The Horse 101 and the Horse 102 on Amazon as stocking stuffers for all your favorite horse lovers.