I’ve got three case examples for you in today’s Horse Mysteries Solved podcast

-Surprising ulcer fix
-Dangerous tripping with high-heel, low-heel syndrome
-Trying to get topline for years, magically fixed overnight

You can listen to the real life stories on today’s podcast.

ttyl,
Renee

PS: We have a new course! It has everything you need to know to keep your horse healthy, and avoid tragic problems. Check it out: Happy Horse mini-course :)

Links Mentioned:
Ulcer Report
Happy Horse mini-course

Summary:
Summary by AI:

Dr. Renee Tucker shares three case reports from her real-world experiences with horses on her podcast. The first case involves a grumpy mare with suspected ulcers whose behavior improved significantly with a change in diet, emphasizing 24/7 access to mixed meadow hay. The second case features a warmblood with tripping issues due to an incorrect barefoot trim, highlighting the importance of proper hoof care. Lastly, a quarter horse with a flat top line and feet is discovered to have dental issues affecting proprioception, demonstrating the interconnectedness of various aspects of horse care. Dr. Tucker emphasizes the importance of holistic management in her Happy Horse mini-course, covering teeth, feet, nutrition, management, and supplements.

Transcript:
Renee (00:00)
Hey, friends. This is Dr. Renee Tucker here. Today for our podcast, I thought I’d talk about two… No, let’s go with three case reports from real-world horses that I actually saw. To make a little bit of realness instead of just talking about general stuff. So these will include, we’re going to talk about one who’s a grumpy horse, has some ulcers, then a tripping horse who’s also got that high heel, low heel syndrome going on. And then the third one, we’ll talk about a horse who’s been barefoot for years and just has no top line. Okay, so here we go. I’ll try to keep these Short and not go on too many tangents, but I cannot promise anything. The first one I saw just a few weeks ago. A mare, Palomino. Grumpy, so grumpy, snarly. Go to touch her. She’s like, Don’t touch me. That look, I will kill you if you try to. I was there to check her out for her grumpiness, and she was working with some therapy kids, so it was really important that she not be so grumpy because it’s scary, too. I checked first the ulcer points. So these are acupuncture points that if they’re super sensitive, we colloquially call them ulcer points.

Renee (01:28)
Horses are off the charts. There’s one down by where the girth, you tie the girth up on the left, one by the sternum, one by the lumbar. You can Google those if you’re very interested. Her ulcer point reaction, she’s like, I’m going to kill you now. So I was able to check her with TBT checkups and know that she had a lot of misalignments that I needed to work on. But as I was feeling her, she had these, for lack of a better word, weak muscle muscles, and just nothing was right. It’s a little hard to explain. Sorry about that. But when you feel thousands of horses, you start knowing when the muscles, they’re a concern because they’re not going to hold any alignments that I do. So I actually said to the owner, Hey, let’s hold on for this one. Tell me about the food. What’s going on? She’s so grumpy. Have you had her checked for ulcers? Well, they were wondering about ulcers, but they didn’t have the money for scope, which is fine. Scoping only gets to the stomach. It doesn’t get the rest of the 100 feet of intestine, so that’s fine.

Renee (02:38)
And they didn’t have the money to just do a trial run of gastro guard, which is like $1,000 for a month, at least here in the US. So they’re worried, and I was the first person to try and see what we could do. They were feeding the horse three times a day in some grain, not a lot, because she was neither fat nor thin. So I said, Listen, let’s save the money on the alignment today. I need you guys to change her food up. Let’s feed her 24/7, just mixed grass hay. Any hay you got, no rye, no alfalfa. Just let her have access to it all the time. I don’t care how much she eats. Just let her do that. Let’s see if we can settle down all this grumpiness and They’re trying to kill you type of idea. So they did. I came back in about a month. It was like a new, dang horse. The grumping was gone, the snarle face was gone. Now, she still had the reactivity to the ulcer points, but it was much less. And she let me touch her, and I was able to align her, which really could relax her even more.

Renee (03:56)
And I felt like her muscles were able to hold. Sometimes with ulcers, it’s just that the body is prioritizing this pain in the gut, and they don’t care what’s happening. With all the rest of the alignment, they just are focused on the pain. In that manner, sometimes you want to hold off to align horses with whatever technique because if they have ulcers, their body is just not prepared to handle anything else but that. I hope that was helpful. If your horse grumpy, just try feeding 24/7 access to mixed meadow hay, no rye, no alfalfa, and see what happens. You could save yourself a lot of money just from that. Now, does that get a hundred % fix every possible ulcer in the horse? Probably not, but it’s going to give her body a really good kickstart to helping heal those up all by herself. And then you go from there. Okay. Let’s see. I do have a report on how to fix ulcers forever, and we’ll link that in the description if you want more interested in more stuff on ulcers. Sorry about that. And there are free ulcer videos, too, on my YouTube channel.

Renee (05:16)
See what happens when I try to talk too fast? Okay, I’ll just slow down and ramble. All right, how about this? The next horse I saw was a beautiful, gorgeous black warm blood. We’ll go with that. I try to stay a little generic with my story so people… I don’t want to gossip per se, but I want to tell the story. Okay. This horse… It’s too late. I’m going on for a long story. I’ve been working on with this horse for quite a while. We started, this guy was cresty-looking metabolic fat. He was on hay two, maybe three times a day, but lots of grain, had shoes on, didn’t get out much. We had to start at the beginning. I did align him because he was a complete disaster, alignment-wise. That made him feel really relaxed and comfortable dropping his head because TBT alignment work, it’s energy work, so super comfortable. Most of the time, horses give you these relaxation clues of licking and chewing and deep breaths, and it’s just so lovely. And this was One of those times when the owner was there and she just started talking to me about her issues.

Renee (06:37)
And one of them was she had three or four fused vertebra in her neck, and she was just standing there holding her neck the whole time. And I just said, Well, gosh, has your chiropractor helped with that? And she’s like, Oh, gosh, no, I can’t go to the chiropractor. The doctor says, I can’t do that because I’ve got these fused disks in my neck. I’m like, Oh, well, that makes sense. But I said, Hey, I could try to do some energy work on you just for five minutes, maybe make it feel better, no charge. I actually love when this happens and it works because I did work on her for five minutes and her whole neck relaxed. She’s like, Oh, my gosh, I’ve had this neck pain for two or three weeks. I can’t get rid of it, and you fix it in five minutes. And this doesn’t always happen, but I sure love when it does. And so she’s like, I don’t care what it is you’re doing, even though it doesn’t look like much. Come back every month. Check my horse. I’ll do whatever you say. Because really, you have to experience it yourself to know how powerful energy work can be.

Renee (07:44)
It just gets really deep in there to the real primary problem and fixes that. In her case, everything gets blamed on these fused disks, but it could be other things, too. There’s plenty in there. Okay, so We had worked together on her horse for, I don’t know, several months, and everything was getting so much better. She was able to get the shoes off. I was so happy to see him barefoot because barefoot is always better. I realized that the things I say, not everybody can do instantaneously, and that’s perfectly fine. What I’m trying to do here is put the goal out. The goal is correct barefoot. Get to that when you can do it. Same with the feed. We switched his feed 24/7 access to mixed meadow hay. No rye, no alfalfa. He did so much better. Even the metabolic-looking fat pads, those definitely started disappearing. So we’re still working on that. Meanwhile, she called me back out because the horse was tripping a little bit, and then all of a sudden did a big trip. She said, Out of nowhere, he tripped, fell to his knees. I’m thinking, What in the heck? What’s going on?

Renee (09:06)
And it’s also… That’s always scary, am I right? I’ve been on a horse that fell to his knees. You think you’re going to roll right off? I’m sure you all have had that happen as well. But for her, with those fused disks in her neck, super scary. I got out there really fast, and I’m thinking, Maybe he did something and tweaked all of his alignments. But no, The alignments were all fine. I thought, That’s so weird. And what I ended up finding was the barefoot trim was wrong, in summary. I was so thrilled that he was barefoot, and It had been a few months, I don’t remember. But I finally, he was starting to develop this high heel, low heel, and he didn’t always have that. So I picked up the high heeled front foot and, come to find out, they were not taking enough of the heel off, particularly the bar of the foot. The bar is basically still hoof wall that just goes around back to the heels. It had overgrown, and they didn’t take it off. So if it’s overgrowing, it just gets flattened down by the horse’s weight. So he technically had this high heel, but it wasn’t really.

Renee (10:21)
It was really just excess heel. So because it was an excess heel that’s tipping him forward. And by the way, those compacted bars that need to be trimmed but aren’t, they start hurting. And then eventually, they’ll start bruising. And if you have a horse who’s over and over again abscessing, you want to make sure that you don’t have barbed material packed up in there because that alone will cause pain and abscessing and tripping. So that was it. We had the interesting fair discussions, and that’s a work in progress. But the heel is getting correctly trimmed now, and he’s not tripping. All right, so the long story of that was, barefoot is absolutely best. But what I’ve learned is it’s got to be a correct barefoot trim. If you’ve been listening to me at all, I do recommend Hoofing Marvelous. They have plenty of free information out on YouTube. That’s with Lindsay Seychell, and she’s really good. Follow them. They have lots of free stuff, and you can figure out if your fairy is doing it right or if you want to learn that trim yourself. Really important because if that had kept going, the horse would have tripped more, Lindsay would have fallen.

Renee (11:41)
Guys, things could have gone really bad. All right? Okay. I think that’s it for that. By the way, just for a summary of all my Happy Horse goals, the perfect way, in my opinion, to have horses live is in my Happy Horse mini course. And of course, we’ll put that link in the description. The third case I’d like to tell you about is a horse who’s a gray horse, mostly pasture, 15-year-old quarter horse. I’m sorry, mostly pasture, mostly out just doing backyard riding, but on lots of hills. Retired owner, super sweet, barefoot for years, and she checks his feet herself. It looks good, and she checks them every day, which is fantastic. Maybe many of you do as well, but she is very paranoid and always checking the horses. For years, the horse has been barefoot, and for years, the horse has had a couple interesting things. One, she can’t get the top line on this horse for anything. I’m thinking in my mind, Well, you’re only going backyard riding, and it’s pretty slow. But no, actually, she was also doing some Cavaletti work. She was working on hill work, doing all little tips and tricks to build a top line, none of it’s working.

Renee (13:11)
She’s got no top line. I mean, there should be some, no matter what you’re doing, but it was flat and totally missing. So no top line. And the other thing she just happened to mention was that her horse’s feet were also flat, like the soles nearly touching the ground, even though it was a correct barefoot trim. And she just happened to say, Jeez, it’s just like his feet. The top line is flat, the feet are flat. I don’t know what to do with them. Of course, she rode him with boots, so he wasn’t hurt. So it was all well. But then one day, she finally got a correct tooth dentist, the kind that do the teeth with the horse’s head low, not on the ground, but low in a neutral position rather than the horse’s head up too high because that’s not a natural grazing position, so we don’t want to float the teeth in that position. You want to have the horse’s head neutral so that everything is matching correctly. In addition, a lot of power dentistry, even though people are trying to be so careful, the power tools take off way too much teeth.

Renee (14:23)
Here’s the summary. When the molars of the horse, that’s the back teeth, if they’re not touching, and touching is called occlusion. So if they’re not occluded, then, crazily enough, the horse’s proprioception decreases. Look, and it’s crazy. It’s all crazy. Why are the nerves of the teeth so important to the body to know where it is in space? That’s what proprioception is. Dude, I don’t know why. It just is. So if the molars are not touching each other, top and bottom, guess what? You’d lose top line, and literally the soles of the feet flatten out. They stretch out, make the feet a little bit more pancakey because the horse is trying to get more surface area in the feet for more information. And when the horse’s top line is decreased, the width of the chest, basically, the width of the feet, so the two front legs get a little wider, the two back legs get a little wider. If the top line, and also along with that, it’s going to be all your core muscles that cause control and everything to be up and tight. So you really need a good dentist. I have all this information, again, in my Happy Horse mini-course, so I’d love for you to take a look at that.

Renee (15:57)
But it’s just fascinating how it’s all connected How you think, Well, does the hay really matter? Does the grain really matter? Does the dentist really matter? It’s so connected, guys. I have five parts in that course. The teeth, the feet, the food, the management type of thing, and then all the accessories. I call it the accessories, everything we add onto the horse, so like supplements and vitamins and minerals and dewormers and all this stuff. It’s all in there. Again, it’s all just the ideal situation, and it’s just a goal for everyone to get there. That’s why I like to talk about it. So please let me know if you have any questions, and then if you have any examples of your horse that you’d like me to address, hopefully I can get that in on a future Horse mystery solve podcast. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you guys later.

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