98. Houston, we have liftoff

Gus and Sandy and I are still struggling to finally rid his hooves of white-line disease.  We thought the iodine was working (as it had when Sandy first adopted Gus years ago), but a complete cure is eluding us.  Sandy’s wonderful farrier, Larry, arrives for a scheduled foot trimming, and I attend in order to ask him questions and get his advice.

Normally, Gus is so good with Larry (really, it’s vice versa) that no assistant is needed — Gus stands nicely in his stall and picks up his feet for his manicure.  Today, Sandy and I enter the stall with Larry, and Gus immediately trots to the far wall.  I put his halter on and Larry approaches, and Gus scoots away wildly.  What the . . . ??  

Sandy takes the rope, and Gus jigs and plunges.  Larry takes the rope, and Gus goes bat-shit ballistic.  He bolts, pulling Larry around and scraping against the walls of the stall. Then he hurls himself at the stall door, rears, and leaps; the door is higher than his chin, but he nearly manages to jump it.  After crashing the door in vain, he does another frantic circuit, knocking into his water bucket, before taking a breather.  Amazingly, he neither pulls Larry off his feet nor tramples me or Sandy.  I make a quick, low-key exit, because fewer humans is always better than more humans when an animal is feeling pressured.

Sandy clicks and treats Gus for standing briefly still, and Larry gives him a slow, soothing patpat, and Gus regains his composure.  (Later Larry realizes that he’s wearing a brand-new set of farrier’s chaps today, and he wonders if the fresh leather smell may be the trigger for Gus’s temporary insanity.)

With Gus back on planet Earth now, I sneak back to the stall but stay outside it.  Patiently answering my questions, Larry gives us a mini-seminar on the hoof component called the white line and on the microbial infection called white-line disease.  He finds signs of damage in both of Gus’s front hooves, but his rear ones (which I had begun to fret about too) look clear.  Larry trims the hooves to tip Gus a hair more upright, to reduce the pressure a bit.  After he and Sandy discuss various over-the-counter remedies, they settle on White Lightning.  Its active ingredient is something like household bleach, but it’s to be diluted with vinegar and held on the hoof for 30 minutes with a gauze wrap or a plastic bag.  That way, the liquids — and, says Larry, the fumes they form — can penetrate the hard horn of the hoof and reach the bugs that need to be killed off.

So we have a treatment plan — yay.  All we have to do is stick Gus’s foot in a plastic bag of liquid and tape it closed around his ankle.  Waht coudl goe rwong??