Gus’s front feet are still ouchy. He stumps along with his head lowered, and totters a bit on uneven ground. He doesn’t want to walk much, let alone trot. Making a turn is clearly uncomfortable: he stutter-steps and staggers until he’s walking straight ahead again.
He makes a miraculous recovery when he gets a dose of the anti-inflamatory phenylbutazone, or bute. He marches right into the arena, ears up and eager for fun. He instigates round after round of trotting. At one point, as we’re trotting in a big loop, he hauls me off the circle and veers off to the pedestal, upon which he pops his front feet with a joyous toss of his head. Before I even cue him, he begins pirouetting around it with verve and panache; and he does it in the other direction too. I'm afraid to let him do too much fancy footwork, but it’s gladdening to see him so frisky.
When Sandy skips the bute, to see how he feels without it, he limps pitiably as we walk to the arena. He’s willing to come when I pat my belly, and he’s willing to walk alongside me, so he gets clicks and treats for that. The more he walks, it seems, the better he feels. At one point, he noses the big beachball, which we haven’t played with in a long time. I roll it slowly and he chases it, at the walk, and bops it nicely with his nose. Click and treat for that too. He wants to keep chasing and bopping the beachball several times around the arena, so I indulge him. It’s a tad depressing — like watching a frail old man who’s determined to totter around a playing field that used to be the scene of his youthful glories. But I stick with it as long as Gus wants to.
When we pause at the opened door at one end of the arena — from here, he can spy on the big geldings out in their paddock — he remembers that the chain-link gate across the doorway can sometimes be nosed open. He presses his whole forehead and face against it a few times, but opposable thumbs have foiled him: we’ve attached a bungee cord to keep it latched. Since he’s clearly interested in egress, and since I’m happy to end our session without stressing his feet any further, I bring him to the proper arena gate and we go out for some grazing.
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| A classic white-line-disease groove around the toe |
Back in his stall, I pick out his hooves and squirt iodine on the soles of the front hooves, near the toes where white-line disease strikes. I can’t see any line or groove there, but I do see a small round dent in the toe of his right hoof, which I had written off as nothing more than a shallow chip. Sandy and I confer. She recalls Gus having white line once before (it seems donkeys are more susceptible than horses), and she knows that it can indeed cause holes, not just grooves or cracks. Apparently it can cause all manner of disintegration in the hoof wall. Yuck.
Sandy crouches and rests the hoof on her knee so that she can closely examine the dent. Suspecting that it’s deeper than it looks, she digs at it carefully, trying to open it up so that iodine can get into it. Gus tolerates this with little fuss — it’s hard to tell if his foot is sensitive to her pokes and prods.
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| An advanced case —we won’t let Gus’s get anywhere near this severe |
We discuss calling a vet. Most refuse to deal with Gus because he’s so violently obstreperous with them, and Sandy figures that any new vet would get the same evil welcome, because Gus perceives their medicinal or previous-horse-stress aromas from afar and instantly panics. Anyway, we’re 95 percent sure this isn’t orthopedic or organic, so it’s more in the wheelhouse of a farrier. We decide to start soaking his hoof twice a day in warm water and iodine, in hopes that will seep into the infection better and finally clear it out. If need be, Sandy will call her doughty and savvy farrier, whose patience over the years has wormed him into Gus’s good graces.
And for now she’ll keep dosing Gus with bute. That gives him such relief that he’ll be, almost literally, dancing for joy.
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