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Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome (EGUS)
AN ACCOUNT OF HOW EQUINE GASTRIC ULCERS CAN RUN YOUR TRAIN RIGHT OFF THE TRACKS:
I'd like to share my experiences with you in hopes that other horses will benefit from my experience, and hopefully your athlete won't have to endure what mine did.
My Arabian mare, Padrona Auventera (Sweets), was 3 1/2 before I began under saddle training. Her rides were very short and light, and relatively infrequent. Basically just enough to give her the idea of things, and get her mind focused in the right direction. "Real" saddle training didn't begin until she was 4 years old. During her 4 year old year she did two very slow Limited Distance (LD) endurance rides, and slow fun trail rides. The ocassional ring work session was introduced, but basically she had a very light workload.
A few notes about her diet and management for history sake:
Spring, Fall, and Summer the horses are turned out pretty much 24/7 on about 10 acres. They can come into 3 stalls in the barn as they choose to get out of heat and bugs. I do put them in the barn during bad thunderstorms. In the winter, they are in around 10 hours a night, because our nights are quite frigid here. The horses are just MUCH happier in their stalls in the deep shavings than standing in -20 below windchills all night. I feed hay almost free choice. I also feed VERY little grain. Just enough to make the soaked beet pulp and alfalfa cubes taste better.
Her training and riding has always been done with tact and compassion. NEVER over facing her, or doing too much too soon. She was allowed to just "grow up" as a baby and wasn't started under saddle until later. Our training session and rides were always short and fun, never drilling and repetitious, or demanding.
Tons of turnout on a large acreage with 2 other horses, very little grain, food ALWAYS in her belly, very very low stress lifestyle. She was always wormed and vaccinated regularly, hooves trimmed regularly. So in short, everything was "right" with her management. This is a KEY POINT because so many horse people think that if your horse develops ulcers, you are feeding them wrong, riding them wrong, and keeping them wrong. THAT'S NOT NECESSARILY TRUE!
Sweets got her barn name honestly! She is a sweetheart! Always up for a challenge, compliant, fun, eager, happy-go-lucky, and truly loves to be on the trail. She's never been barn sour or buddy sour or had any vices or quirks. Overall she has always been a really great little mare, up for anything I presented to her. As a foal also she loved humans and loved human attention. She was always first at the gate when I went out, and she was always happy to go for walks with me down the road.
However, the "down-side" of her personality is that she is very hot and very reactive. Because of this, I didn't think "too" much of her increasingly hard to handle behavior. I was operating under the assumption that she was behaving like a normal 5 year old athlete with plenty of energy to burn. Her muscles were hard and defined, her coat gleamed, her hooves expanded a whole size in one year, and she was really showing some amazing potential for Endurance racing. She had great recoveries, her vet scores were excellent, and more than ever she wanted to get down the trail as quickly as possible. She was a real worker. Actually I rode her suprisingly little. Maybe once or twice a week at most, sometimes skipping a whole week or 10 days at a stretch. But she stayed in great physical shape, mostly due to her 24/7 turnout schedule in a huge pasture with 2 other horses that moved around a lot.
But this summer (2008), things started to fall apart. The more fit and athletic she got, the spookier and hotter she became. She eats very little grain (maybe 1 pound a day), soaked beet pulp, grass hay, and some alfalfa. She is turned out 24/7 but her under saddle behavior was becoming more like that of a racing fit Thoroughbred, high on 20 pounds of sweet feed and stalled all night and day! Let me back up and say that she has never felt truly dangerous under saddle, but the tension level became sky high. It became harder and harder to ride her alone because she would spook so badly. The spooks were mainly at the canter but ocassionally during the trot she'd slam on the breaks and spin for absolutely no reason that I could tell. (But - there's ALWAYS a reason...) But it seemed if I rode her with another horse, the behavior was signifigantly improved. On the ground she continued to be very sweet and easy to handle. I rarely even have to tie her up to trim her hooves. I just drop the rope in the aisle and she stands. But the spooking under saddle was getting increasingly difficult to deal with.
Thinking it was possibly a hormonal mare thing, I started her on 1 ounce of Mare Magic daily, and 1 ounce of Remission (magnesium supplement.) Things did seem to improve somewhat (possibly because of the magnesium) but the improvement was very short lived.
The final straw was a trail ride with a friend in which Sweets was terrified of everything. She spooked at velcro unzipping, or the other horse coughing. Any funny colored weed or shadow scared her to death. She would calm down and seem to do fine, then we'd canter a short ways, and she was frantic all over again. After that particularly frustrating ride, we took the horses to the river and went out in the chest deep water. Sweets immediately relaxed and almost fell asleep, despite tons of activity going on in the water (swimmers, dogs, boats). I was jumping off her into the water, swimming all around her, and she could not have cared less. She didn't budge, but just relaxed and nearly fell asleep. I wondered if the cold water was alleviating some kind of pain? That was a Monday, and by that Thursday, I had a gastroscope done for the possibility of ulcers.
Here's my girl, getting her scope done, and what the vet found:
And ulcers we did find!!! Lots of them, and bleeding in a couple of places. No wonder the poor girl was so frantic under saddle. She was experiencing significant pain.
So if everything was right with the management - - - how did this horse develop ulcers?????
There are a couple of theories the vets gave me to ponder. First - ulcers in foals is VERY common, especially in the "hotter" natured breeds. It is very possible that Sweets developed ulcers at weaning, and having never been given treatment, they continued to fester and worsen. Another theory is that she may have a sensitivity to chemical dewormers, and just the act of worming her every 3 months may have caused the ulcers, and made them worse over time. And finally, some horses just produce a lot of stomach acid - it's genetic and there's nothing you can do except manage it. Some humans are this way as well.
She began 1 tube of Gastrogard (Omeprazole) daily for 35 days. I waited through 10 days of treatment before riding her. We took her on a 16 mile organized trail ride and she was pretty much terrible for that ride. She definitely wasn't back to her old self. However, at this time, she is dramatically improved. No spooking, no threat to spook, very relaxed, forward, happy, calm, and game for anything. I FINALLY feel like I've got my girl back.
I have always been good about letting her graze during trail rides, giving her a haybag in the trailer, and on the side of the trailer while grooming and tacking up. I never let her "go hungry" for a minute.
In addition to Gastrogard, I've started her on 1 ounce of Pro-CMC daily, and 10,000 mg of MSM. I've increased the amount of soaked no-molasses beet pulp she gets, and also increased her alfalfa a bit, as directed by the veterinarians working on her case. She is also getting soaked alfalfa cubes in with the beet pulp every night.
I'm confident that she'll have a complete recovery and we'll get back to "life as normal" before our train derailed. She will be on preventative treatments the rest of her life to prevent a full recocurrence again. I suppose the take home message from this article is to PLEASE GET A GASTROSCOPE IF YOUR HORSE'S BEHAVIOR SUDDENLY AND DRAMATICALLY CHANGES. Certain breeds such as Thoroughbreds, Saddlebreds, Standardbreds, and Arabians seem to be at particularly high risk, but ANY horse that is trailered, stressed or competed frequently is at risk. If your horse tends to be more of the hot/reactive type anyway, I would definitely talk to your vet about the danger of ulcers and how to diagnose and prevent them.
UPDATE (January 3, 2009):
Well, I'm happy to report that ALL spooking and nutty behavior has completely stopped! It's been two months since I've seen any sign of the undesirable spooks, spins, and bucks. Sweets walks calmy in a flat footed walk on trail rides, regardless of what other horses around her are doing. Yes, she's still a hot and reactive type of horse, that's just her personality. But there's no sign of the wild and outrageous behavior she was displaying while she had ulcers.
UPDATE (April 5, 2009):
Sweets has not had any Gastrogard for the last couple of months, and unfortunately some of her eratic behavior under saddle has returned. I am really disheartened by this, given the high cost of Gastrogard and Ulcergard. Even the maintenance dose is cost prohibitive, so I will be looking into other alternatives that may be more affordable but still effective.
COST OF TREATMENT:
The cost of Gastrogard is high - about $40 a day for a 1,000 pound horse, and even higher if your horse is larger than 1,250 pounds. There are other medications available that are a bit cheaper than Gastrogard, but they work to only absorb or neutralize stomach acid instead of shutting down proton pumps which are responsible for acid production. Only your vet can tell you what's the best treatment option for your particular case.
Ulcers cause needless pain and loss of performance. Keep a training log and take note of any uncharacteristic behavior. If you start to see a pattern, PLEASE try to identify a medical cause before assuming it is a training issue.
HELPFUL LINKS AND GOOD READING (Click links below):
Gastrogard (Merial) Website
Ulcers, Stomach, and the Hind Gut
Equine Gastric Ulcers
SO WHAT ABOUT PREVENTION?
There are lots of products you can use to help PREVENT further ulcer episodes:
And don't forget about.......ALFALFA!
You will need to make management changes such as providing more turnout time, less stalling, free access to forage, less stress in the environment, and so forth. But if you're already doing those and the horse is still ulcer prone, he will greatly benefit from a regime that focuses on neutralizing acid in the stomach, and conditioning the digestive tract with essential nutrients, electrolytes and bacteria.
Some horses also respond well to continued treatment with compounded omeprazole, cimetidine, or ranitidine.
If you have a performance horse that is dosed with electrolytes during heavy work, you can use the pink liquid Pro-CMC as a buffer. The flavor is well accepted, and electrolytes mix in quite well with it.
A note about PRICING: Be sure to google any supplement you decide on, and check MANY different sources for their product cost plus shipping fees. I have found widely varrying costs on these products and it really pays to shop around! Some online farm supply places, like Valley Vet, charge a small order handling fee that can be as much as $10, so VERY CAREFULLY review your shopping cart before checking out!
There have been observations indicating that MSM is beneficial to horses with ulcers. I feed MSM as a joint prevention measure, and not to mention the added gutt benefit.
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