Little Blue Equine

20/01/2025

****📣 PLEASE SHARE 📣**** I am conducting research into management of laminitis as part of my veterinary degree at the University of Liverpool and I would really appreciate it if anyone who has any experience of caring for a horse with laminitis could complete it and share 🩺 ✅ . We want to hear your experiences and opinions - this is a great chance to raise what you felt was good and bad about your vets management or advice, and who else you found most helpful when your horse or pony experienced laminitis! Hopefully this research will be published and presented so please share your feelings/experiences if you feel able to!

I am trying to collect as many responses to help our future understanding of this terrible disease. Even if you can’t complete it, sharing would help massively 🙏🏻.

If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch with me directly 📩 or alternatively you can use the contact details in the survey if you’d prefer 📑.

Meg x

Has your horse or pony ever had laminitis?

Horse owners and carers - we're inviting you to take part in our survey investigating approaches to treatment and rehabilitation of laminitis in horses and ponies. The study is being undertaken by undergraduate student Meg as part of her University of Liverpool veterinary degree. As every case of laminitis is different, we are keen to hear about your experiences of laminitis and its management. If you would like to participate (the questionnaire is completely anonymous), please click on the link below or scan the QR code in the image and read through the information sheet before completing the online survey.

Survey link: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/liverpool/approaches-to-treatment-and-rehabilitation-of-laminitis

Thank you in advance for participating - it really helps improve our understanding of this important area of equine health.

18/07/2024

04/04/2024

18/01/2024

Helping image 😄

You should strive for your horse to open his throat latch. Only then can he move completely relaxed and correct over his back, with active hind quarters and free shoulders.

With a lot of horses this can be really difficult and it is a proces. So don’t worry if you can not achieve this right away with your horse, but keep working towards it.

“Forward and nose out, throat open!”

Josepha

Image by Sandy Rabinowitz for Dressage Today.

09/10/2023

Retraining ‘misbehaviour’ can be mentally harmful - even when using ‘positive reinforcement’.

“Huh? But positive reinforcement (R+) is, by definition, ‘kind’, isn’t it? It’s still better than the alternative, which is using pressure and release (R-) or Punishment (P+, P-)“

But herein lies the problem with not thinking beyond the operant quadrant, and only having anticedent adjustments (environmental triggers) and retraining in the toolbox. There isn’t just ‘the’ alternative (singular).

Say, your 12 year old ISH was an FEI competition machine until you bought him at the age of 8. He knew to stand still regardless of whatever was happening around or to him. He was quiet and biddable, but disconnected.

Say it has taken him 4 years to reconnect enough to behave like a horse around you. Now he can finally mutually groom other horses without biting them and being chased away, he’s got a social life and real horse friends.

He’s also experienced the abrupt loss of horses from his life, through people moving them, or him, away.

So now, he has finally got some real horse friends, he also feels anxious they may be lost at any minute too.

Isn’t it completely understandable when he is asked to stand out of sight and is tied up, that this makes him anxious? That he might start to become fidgety when you want to wash his legs - whereas last year he was that biddable, easy horse.

Is this ‘misbehaviour’ a negative development? Absolutely not. It is actually a positive, in terms of mental well-being. He is still in recovery from 8 years of being ignored, flooded, under-socialised and developmentally compromised. Only 4 years of being allowed to be a horse, regarded and treated as sentient by people, and communicating and being listened to (as much as possible).

Does the fidgeting need retraining? No. Absolutely the wrong thing to do.

He already knows how to stand still, that’s what other people did to him. All horses can stand still - they don’t need to be trained.

To stand still now he needs to feel safe. He needs to know his friends are still around, and that the human is also trustworthy. Then he’s going to stand just fine to wash his legs and he’ll even munch some haylage.

He feels he can express himself now and that’s a GOOD thing. He can say how he feels and there is no need to escalate because I listen.

It’s MY responsibility to help him feel better. I should not manipulate his behaviour and make him bury his anxiety, through retraining. That would be harmful to his mental well-being, and our relationship.

To anyone seeing my horse ‘misbehave’ and fidget I may look like a rubbish trainer. Fine with me, I’m not a great trainer, but I’m a bloody good equine psychology specialist and that’s the difference.

*Photo shows my horse now feeling safe, untied, with cleaned legs, eating haylage from a net and on the floor with a relaxed expression.*

14/07/2023

How much does applied contact / bit pressure affect stride length? …. This much!!!

There is a huge difference to applying contact to the reins VS the horse coming up, through and onto its own contact. Applying strong unforgiving contact can hollow the horse and inhibit the hind leg action, riders often then have to resort to excessive forward to keep the horse going.

The connection from “hyoid to hind leg” involves the sternohyoid to sternum through the diaphragm to psoas major.

To see the videos of this in action check it out on our patreon (this one is from todays live feed dissection).

https://www.patreon.com/bonesbrainsbodiesbehaviours/

01/06/2023

An absolutely huge apology to anyone who is waiting for a reply from me or who I didn’t get to see today because of being stuck at Glan Clwyd hospital waiting for a scan review for this abnormally large baby. I was there from 2pm and was leaving the car park at 8pm 🤦🏼‍♀️. Hopefully I won’t be back here until it’s showtime ✨! Again, huge apologies and thank you to everyone for being understanding. I promise I will get back to everyone this evening or tomorrow morning 🙏🏻.

Meg x

26/04/2023

Makes the long days and chaotic diary all worth it when I receive messages like this from happy clients ✨