What a beautiful day! Not too many November days are so nice that I can work outside in barefoot and shorts.

A bit of an emergency with Beauty last night. She didn’t eat all of her feed at chores last night, which was concerning, so we stayed out to keep an eye on her for a few minutes. When she dropped and started to try to roll I was concerned, and walked over to her. She got up and walked outside the pen and went down again, tried to roll and made some moaning noises. I figured colic and called the vet, but being it was after 5, it went to their answering service, and had to wait about 10 minutes for the vet on call to get back to me. Christian went back out to check on her and said she was still laying down, and when the vet called I told him what was going on and he agreed it sounded like colic and asked if I wanted him to come out. Ummm, yes, I do. So while I was waiting for him I went out to get her up and walking. By this time it was dark and I wasn’t thinking too well, didn’t grab the flashlight, so one the way out I grabbed a solar light. LOL, yup, a solar light. What can I say? It did help me find her, because she wasn’t laying down anymore, she was standing in the pasture. Since I had my phone with, I went onto Facebook and the rescue group Saved page and wrote down what was going on. Others agreed it sounded like colic.

She had just taken a dump, and it looked normal, so that was good. But she was making noises in her throat, snorting and drooling, and it hit me that this wasn’t colic. I got her to walk out to the driveway and after about 10 minutes, she was quiet, no noises in her throat, no snorting. So back onto Facebook, and ta couple people said it sounded like choke. I walked her around a bit and she started eating grass, and I was thinking the vet is going to get here and he’s going to think I’m an overanxious horse newbie, because obviously there’s nothing wrong with her. But when he did get here and I explained what had happened, he tried to take her temperature, which she was having nothing to do with, so we got her calmed down and he listened to her heart, lungs and gut, and checked her mouth. I told him about seeing dissolved feed in her nostrils and her snorting; she finally settled down enough for him to take her temp, which was normal. He asked if I’d ever heard of choke, and I said I had, compliments of Facebook. For some reason, he said, they’d been having a rash of choke the past couple of weeks, and most of them were horses that were fed pellets. The horse gets greedy and wolfs down the food, pellets get stuck in the throat and then expand from the moisture, and the horse starts choking. Fortunately she cleared it out herself. So now we’ll be soaking her food before feeding her. Another learning experience…

So anyway, the farrier came out last week to clip her hooves, and she would have nothing to do with it. So yesterday Christian went to the vet and got a sedative, and today he came back to try again. It didn’t even phase her! So next week the vet and Barry are going to come out and the vet is going to administer the sedative and get a proper dosage figured out for her.