Brynmala wrote:Also Ollie (now 27) has just been diagnosed with very borderline Cushings. Anyone got any tips on managing it?
L has two horses with Cushing and both are on medication. Though I think one is boarderline case as well and you can't really see huge difference in the horse. But the other one with more 'severe' case does clearly better with medication and his blood values are now totally normal. His never been the best when it comes to shedding his winter coat, but this year it's coming off super well. He does seem to have some issues keeping weight on currently, but that's not necessarily due to just Cushing. The milder case pony got random mild laminitis few years back, which caused the cushing suspicion, so he's no longer allow in the pasture (he's also quite chubby case anyway).
But from my understanding the medication is very effective in most cases, and you need to be little mindful about sugars and starch in the diet, but not necessarily to point of trying to get all down to 0. Cushing horses tend to loose muscle more easily, so easily digestable proteins are good. If needs extra energy then adding oil is good option over grain, due to the low sugar/starch recommendation.
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I'm home and I got to go to the stable and ride and spent basically the entire day there! <3 All my ponies are doing fine.
Heta is in really good shape and her summer itch hasn't kicked in too bad yet. She's still shedding some, but I think I got rid of good amount of hair today when grooming. She's super dusty though, so I think tomorrow bath will be in order. R has been apparently riding her a lot on trails as leading horse and has really liked her in that job. She also has managed to dig up some nice clean tolt from Heta on the trails, so I guess I can't ditch my clean tolt dreams just yet.
Tý has definetly lost weight since winter (good thing as he was kinda fat), as they are now off free fed hay. But now he is almost little too skinny for my taste. So that will need to be adressed, he's also in weird shedding stage where he's not really shedding, but he's still kinda fluffy coated, it's just not that long. Riding wise, I feel like he hasn't gotten worse and in some parts he has gotten better. Obviously M hasn't been working him super hard like technique wise, so I didn't think they would have been massive improvement anyway. But he definetly feels little more comfortable and confident on the small trail nearest to the stable and generally has matured some mentally. R did tell me he had really bad reaction to a car one time on trails, but that was partly due the driver being idiot.
M had mentioned this incident to me, but never told me about the driver and actually how bad it was... But he has also behaved decently when the cars have also passed nicely. So we really need to work on getting him used to cars somehow (my suggestion was to drive around him on the arena
).
Feykja is looking pretty good. She's kinda akward 2 year old, but has matured quite a bit and looks fairly nice. L just says she has been bit of a nightmare as she wants to be the one getting picked up from the paddock to the point where she tries to follow or stop other horses being taken away... ^^; I think tomorrow she'll get her extra attention and maybe little run around on the arena as well. Today she just had to settle for looots of scratches and cuddles.