The deed is done.

Sorry for my small bits of hiatus. I am currently in Michigan for a friend's wedding (which was THE fairytale wedding of the century, SERIOUSLY), and am headed back to Connecticut tonight. The less often I get to come home to Michigan, the more I miss it. I kind of don't want to go back.


Anyway. Dr. C came out on Thursday after I had already ridden Gogo (and she was fairly lovely but coming into heat so a little bit distractable), and after wrestling with it mentally (and physically, really) for a year, it was finally decided that hock injections were in fact the best and kindest way to approach the changes in her hocks. These changes are not causing lameness at this point, but they will in the future if I am not proactive now. I've done as much as I can otherwise to help her body, but she's given me the signs of needing a little more help than that. With all that in mind, I made the decision to do what I had hoped I wouldn't have to for maybe another year yet. Arthritis is not curable. All I can do at this point is try to keep her as comfortable as possible for the remainder of her years. We'll never know just why this started in her, or how. If I had been pounding on her as a 3 year-old, yes. But she lived in a field until she was nearly 5. Her hind end conformation is pretty correct. When I was jumping her hardest, it was once a week at the very most, over fences that maxed out at around 2'9", and rarely. But, it still happened. And there is no use now in crying over spilled milk. When the systemic solutions were not enough, I went directly to the source of the problem. And when we went into the low joint in that right hock, there was a bit of excess fluid that came leaking back out of the needle, a good sign that there was some inflammation in there. Despite my personal aversion to injections (and how I feel very strongly that they are an American sickness and crutch), deep down I know that I did the right thing.

And I feel better now that it is done. Now, I can stop fretting about it every day. Now, I know that she can get back to doing what she really seems to love - running and jumping - without fear on her part or mine that she will experience any discomfort in those wonky hocks. I'm very interested to see how she feels post-injection. She has today, tomorrow, and Sunday off, and then I will hack her Monday and see just how she feels.


I did the right thing. Whether or not she's running and jumping or just hanging out in a field, I still want her to be as comfortable as possible, and would likely have opted for this in the end no matter what my intentions with her were, sport or otherwise. Nevertheless, I still can't help feeling a little weird. I've talked about this before, but things like this always bring up the morality question: why do we do things to horses that break them? Why do we need things like injections in order to keep them going for our own amusement? This is one of the reasons why I have absolutely no intentions of ever being a professional rider or trainer. At the top levels of sport, somedays you HAVE to go train and ride no matter whether or not you or the horse feel in top shape. Especially right after I got Gogo back from Crazy Trainer, she would have days where she looked like a zombie, and I couldn't bring myself to do more than just play with her on those days. I think that's the right thing to do. She always came out better the next day for it. And yes, I'd lose a day of training, but better that than lose her brain to continual pounding when she couldn't mentally handle it. Last week, when she was feeling especially crappy and before I started her on the aloe, she had a day just like that. When I went to pull her out to ride her, she just looked at me as if to say, please no. And I didn't have the heart to disagree. Sometimes, as a professional, you have to compete a horse (client or otherwise) that you know isn't ready. That you know isn't all that sound. That you know you shouldn't. But you're under so much pressure, and you risk losing money, losing clients. So what do you do? Your four-star horse NEEDS to jump today, but he's feeling exhausted from a tough gallop the day before. You're going to the Pan Ams in two weeks and you can't risk deviating from your rigorous workout schedule. What do you do? I certainly don't possess nearly that kind of talent that I would ever find myself in that situation anyway, but in a similar professional setting on a lesser scale? I couldn't do it. I couldn't make myself.

This is a large part of why I want to go into alternative farrier work. I want to help horses feel and perform the best they can and be as healthy as they can. There isn't a soul around who wouldn't agree with you that keeping a horse barefoot IS the healthiest way for them, but it's just a fact we barefoot folks need to face: people have a point when they say they doubt a horse's ability to go around Rolex without some sort of additional traction. What horse in the wild is going around at a flat-out gallop leaping over enormous obstacles? Shoeing may or may not be the unhealthier way to keep a horse going, but this is where my dream career comes in... there HAS to be a better way than shoes, I WANT to find a better way. We all know the problems that can come with shoeing, so I'm not about to list them. Boots fall off, wiggle, cause rubs. Epoxy custom shoes can fail too. Our healthier alternatives are not yet good enough. I want to find a better way.

We've come a long, long, long way over the domestication of horses. I mean, for god's sake it used to be common practice to take a saucer full of turpentine and hold it to a horse's naval to cure founder. Hopefully in a hundred-odd years, technology will have finally given us our perfect alternative to shoes. And our kids (well, not mine, I'm not going to have any little runts) will look back and go wow, remember when our grandparents used to actually nail stuff to their horse's feet?