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  Discussion on Injury from wall-kicking
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Member:
Frances

Posted on Sunday, Oct 23, 2005 - 8:52 am:

DrO, what are the most likely types of injury that a chronic wall-kicker may sustain?

The background to this question is that my mare, who is being rehabbed for a suspensory injury in the LF, has been unsound for some time in the RH. It shows up as as occasional "ouch" at walk. (We are only doing about 35 mins walk and 5 mins trot at present.)

She tore a piece of coronet off at the start of summer, and this area has now grown down to ground level. She is barefoot at the back. The vet found pain here with the hoof tester.

He also felt something (pain? heat?) in the right hock, but said it could come from her protecting herself from hoof pain. He performed 3 flexion tests on the RH fetlock.

He decided that the pain was probably coming from the damaged hoof, and that I should give her 1 gram of Bute daily until the damaged area has grown out, so that she doesn't cause problems to her joints by protecting them.

She also has a vertical crack running upwards from the RH toe, which the farrier tried to stop by cutting quite a deep groove at the last trimming. When I asked him at that time if it could be causing pain, he said no, that it wasn't deep enough to be painful. However, I noticed last week that there was a thick hard rectangle of horn splaying forward at the toe, about 1.5 cm. in height and 1 cm. wide, with the original crack forming one side, a new crack the other, and the groove taking a lot of leverage I would think with every stride. The next day this chunk of horn snapped off at the groove. It seems to me that this could also have been a source of pain.

What I really want to ask though, is whether we should be checking anything else out, e.g. whether she could have fractured anything in the hoof by kicking? She did become extremely lame in that foot one morning in August with a kind of snatching up of the hoof at the second phase of each stride, however was immensely better at midday when the vet came (typical), hardly showing any sign of this at all), yet extremely lame on it again in the evening. I was tearing my hair out. By the next day, though, she was fine, so I presume it couldn't have been a fracture? We assumed she had laid into the wall exceptionally hard the previous evening and bruised the foot.

Any thoughts on this rather muddled scenario (sorry) appreciated, especially as the farrier is coming out on Wed.
Moderator:
DrO

Posted on Monday, Oct 24, 2005 - 7:27 am:

It sounds unclear to me why the horse is lame and from your description I think a complete lameness work up should be done as described in the Diagnosis Overview article if the horse becomes lame again. The foot does sound susceptible to abscess with all the damaged horn however.
DrO
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