Tail goes bald,whiteblaze falls out every spring last 5 yrs, after to diff state

Hello,

OK. This one is really perplexing. This is a rather long story because it’s been going on over 5 years and I’ve tried just about everying under the sun. Nothing helps, and the diagnosis from two vets does not make sense, either. Hopefully someone here has some ideas as to what this could be and what I can do to help this horse. This has been going on every single spring for the last 5 years straight. Tail hair falls out in the spring, grows back in the fall. The white blaze is the only white on the horse’s body that has hair lose. Before the horse went to another state without me, the horse never had a hair loss problem. I am the breeder, I bred the mother, I owned the grandmother, and I owned the father. None of them had any skin or hair problems. None of the grandmother’s other offspring had a hair problem. The other foal from the same dam did not have a hair problem. This horse has four white legs and white blaze. The white legs never have a skin or hair problem, it’s just the white blaze, the tail and some spots on the neck and between hind legs. There are several spots on the neck near the jugular area that every single spring lose hair in the exact same spot. The lecisions are roundish.

Several other horses went to the same state with this one and they all came back together. None of them have any hair problems. Prior to going to this other state, this horse never had excessive bug sensitivity, but it does now. Bugs LOVE this horse over any other horse on the property, but the seasonal tail hair loss and white blaze hair loss are not from bugs. I will share how I know this in a moment.

The horse returned from out of state in the month of September and it had it’s normal long full tail. It had what looked like bite marks on the shoulders and neck. They were round marks. In my lifetime of owning horses, I’ve never had a horse with ringworm (knock wood). This is not ring worm. The following January is when the hair at the end tail started falling out in large clumps. Pretty soon the entire lower 2/3 of the tail were completely balde. The upper 1/3 still had hair. The vet did a punch biopsy. I cannot recall exactly what the diagnosis was, but the vet said to treat with chlorhexadine. I did, but that did nothing. The horse was later put on a low dosage of Dex (I want to say it was 4 pills? The horse weighs 1250 lbs, and a vet at the hospital said that was too low of a dosage.). The Dex possibly helped reduce some itching. The next year I took the horse to the vet hospital. They did three punch biopsies: blaze, neck and tail. They also cultured udder smegma and tested for allergies. The skin biopsies didn’t show anything significant and supposedly clorhexadine would help. The smegma cultured malassezia. The test for alopecia areata supposedly came back positive (I never felt like this was the correct diagnosis. The horse has seasonal hairloss on white blaze and tail. Alopecia areata is not seasonal, right? The hair grows back on the face in the fall. The tail also grows back in the fall. Allergy testing showed some grasses, pollens, dust mites, and flies. I did the allergy shots for awhile, but it didn’t seem to help, so I stopped. I tried just about every antifungal cream under the sun on the udder. The tail hair still fell out. I washed the horse in clorhexadine, very light bleach dosage mixed with shampoo (this actually might have helped a little), antisebborheic shampoo. The antisebborheic shampoo helped lift skin flakes off the skin of the tail, hair would grow a little, but never enough. Part of the problem was that the horse would swish it’s tail stub, and the end of the tail would hit the sides of the horse’s rump and the end of the tail was bald.

Eventually I realized the tail cover on the winter blanket rubbed the tail, so I cut the tail cover off. That helped, but then the hair fell out the next spring. The horse wore a fly sheet, but I realized the same thing was occuring with the fly sheet cover, so I cut that off. But then the horse would swish it’s stub of a tail, and the end of the tail stub would get rubbed against the material of the fly sheet and any hair that tried to grow would not.

The next year the horse went without any fly sheet. It swiched it’s tail so much, there was a hairless spot on either side of it’s flank.

This last winter I did something different. I didn’t blanket the horse. I only fed hay it wasn’t allergic too: timothy and alfalfa. No orchard grass because allergy testing showed that it was allergic. The tail hair grew back nicely. The blaze didn’t grow a lot of hair, but it tried. Another thing I did was put electric tape up so the horse could not itch on anything. This year it was a miracle because the tail hair stayed on April, instead of the usual January or February. I just recently noticed that the tail hair had started looking thin in the middle of the tail. It was falling out on it’s own. I got some Pyranha Shampoo and washed the horse a week ago. The hair still fell out. Today I washed the blaze with clorhexadine shampoo. The hair is completely gone in the upper 2/3 of the blaze. I washed the tail with the antisebborheic shampoo. There was some flaky skin on the tail, so I removed that. Some of the tail hair came out easily as I washed it, just as it has for the last 5 years when I wash it since this all started. Then I decided to try to make a tail bag that attached like a crupper over the horse’s croup. I made it out of stretchy lycra for the tail bag and used polo wraps in a neck loop and then towards the tail. That worked for about 1/2 hour until the horse got it’s tail out of the bag, so I removed everything.

I am in a low selenium area. The state and area of that state the horse went to is even lower in selenium. The horse had a salt mineral block while it was in that state, but there’s no way that it was able to consume enough selenium through that salt block. The horse had not had extra selenium since it’s hair started falling out. I cannot find any literature that says low selenium causes hair loss, only selenium toxicity can. A couple years I fed the horse all sorts of extras, but nothing helped, so I stopped. Ground flax made the coat glow. I squirted A and D injectable over the feed, tried probiotics, spirulina, brewers yeast, bakers yeast and many other supplements. It made no difference except that the coat glowed beautifully. The last few years the horse has had alfalfa, feed store quality grass hay (it’s always been orchard until this past year it’s been timothy) and a local grass hay. Pasture. Beet pulp and rice bran when needed. General vitamin supplement. I’ve used hydroxazine to reduce itchiness and bug sensitivity, but the tail hair still falls out.

Does anyone have any idea of what this could be? This just doesn’t make sense that it’s alopecia areata since it’s seasonal hair loss, does it? The horse is shedding it’s winter coat. I saw some flakiness on flank area below the hip bone, so I grabbed some of the hair and dandruff so I could look at it under a magnifying glass. I even put on my magnifying glasses and looked under that magnifying glass so I could get an even closer look. I do not see anything that looks like it’s bugs, unless they are too small to see with double magnifying. It’s possible I saw very very tiny black bugs, but they might have been skin flakes. They were too tiny to make out any obvious signs that they were bugs. I was really disapointed that there was nothing obvious.

I really hope someone can help me. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can connect a tail bag or fake tail when there is no hair to attach anything to? My next idea is to try connecting one to a fly sheet, but based on how easily the horse got it’s tail out of the tail bag today, I don’t know that this will work. Too bad that there’s not an adhesive that I could attach a very light weight tail bag to the tail, but I don’t think there is.

Thank you in advance if you made it through my entire story!