Why do they shoot horses?

Factual Questions
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Large Animal Vet Checking in here:

The trouble with horses is that they are not designed to bear weight on 3 legs. If they do, the other leg can either develop laminitis - a life threatening separation of the hoof from the bone- or tendon breakdown. At New Bolton Center, he can be floated in the pool every so often to take the weight off the other legs. They did that for Niatross, a famous Standardbred stallion who lost his hooves to laminitis. Other places can use a sling for varying lengths of time to help get thei weight off the other legs. There’s a horse in the hospital were I work that has been in a sling for about 3 months due to a broken leg.

Also, there’s not much in the horse’s lower leg except skin, bone, and some tendons. So the blood supply isn’t what it would be in an area that has lots of muscle.

On the bright side - veterinary medicine has come a long way and many horses that were put down 10 years ago have been saved and go back to lead comfortable lives.

It’s also a good thing that it was a hind leg. The front limbs bear 60% of the horse’s weight, so laminitis is much more common in the front limbs.

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The article I read on SI.com this morning was upbeat too. A cautious hurrah!

My TB is fine, fat and lazy. He needs to work off his hay belly.

On Saturday I visited a friend in New Hampshire and paid my respects at my old QH’s grave in her field.

Sternvogel, do you know whether Barbaro was wearing rim shoes or toe grabs, or was flat-shod?

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What the heck – I posted this originally at Fathom, to answer a question, why can a broken leg kill a horse. I’m sure the vets here can correct anything I misstated:

Why a broken leg can kill a horse

Horses are designed by nature to be four-legged, and to carry their weight almost evenly divided between those four legs. The forehand (front part of the horse) carries somewhat more weight than the hindquarters,so in that respect it’s a sliver of good news that the break is in a hind leg. Still, that’s a thousand-pound-or-so animal with all rather than half of his hindquarters’ weight now concentrated on one leg.

The danger from that is laminitis – a painful, often agonizing inflammation of crucial soft tissue within the hoof that connect the interior structures with the hoof wall. Laminitis isn’t fully understood even today, but it’s been killing horses as long as they’ve been domesticated. Infection can trigger it, and so can prolonged or extreme overloading. Here is one article explaining it; there are tons more you can Google. If Barbaro founders (reaches the stage of laminitis where the pedal bone tears free and sinks through the hoof sole) in his good foot, he literally will have no hind foot to stand on, since even with a strong walking cast he can’t take all of his weight on the broken leg. The very good news this morning is that Barbaro is putting appropriate weight on the broken leg and moving around.

Another danger of course is from infection. Barbaro’s fortunate in that according to reports the skin wasn’t broken despite the horrendous shattering of the bones within, so his first line of defense held. Surgery would be under sterile conditions as strict as in any human operating room, but the risk of course can’t be totally eradicated.

The bones may not heal sufficiently for Barbaro to be fully weight-bearing on them. If he doesn’t heal well enough to be four-legged (no doubt with a gimpy gait because he’ll never be able to bend that ankle again) he’ll inevitably develop laminitis, founder and intractable pain requiring euthanasia.

Another danger is colic. This is an athlete trained to a peak of fitness, accustomed to galloping a mile or more most days, or being free to roam a paddock on his rest time at the owners’ farm. Now he’ll be confined for months to a stall, eventually allowed strictly limited hand-walking, and horses in such situations can develop colic because their digestive efficiency is upset by the change in routine. Colic can require major surgery – itself a risk – and can be incurable, requiring euthanasia to relieve the suffering.

Let’s see, what else? He could kick out with the injured leg, rebreak something, and further surgery might not be able to fix it. Or… Hey, I just found another article that does a great job of summing up all the dangers facing Barbaro, even with the surgery being successful.

I can’t find statistics – I know they’re out there somewhere but my Google-fu is lacking this morning – on how often racehorses break down during a race. I did find this report of an Australian study of racehorse fractures. It includes information about steeplechasers as well as flat racers but has useful information. I also found this Google cache article.

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I read an article yesterday, but I can’t find it right now. It said that a new type of surface had been used in Europe for a few years and that the number of injuries to horses had declined dramatically. This surface had been installed at a track somewhere in California and they had something like 6 or 8 horse injuries compared to 24 injuries in the same time span before the the new surface was installed.

I think that is one thing that most people don’t realize is that many horses are injured and put down every year in racing accidents. We generally only hear about the accidents to big name horses or accidents that happen in big name races.

Another issue, from what I read, is that there is no single governing body that regulates thourobred racing in the US. So, even if the new surface is the key to saving many horses there may not be any compulsion for tracks to change to it.

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Here is the story that I mentioned: Barbaro’s injury should advance cause of track safety

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With all do respect to the posters in this and the previous thread - BS. Having @ 70 horses and helping the family run a very high quality Quarter & Paint horse operation, I have (unfortunately) had to shoot a large number of horses over the years who were needlessly suffering. Our vets (we have a number of them we use) generally shoot the horses they are “putting down” rather than use an injection because, in their words, the injections take time to work and it just prolongs the suffering. It is never a happy event (the only time I ever see my father cry is when he has to shoot a beloved horse), shooting of horses happens fairly frequently on the ranches I’m around.

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The new type of surface is probably called Polytrack. Here’s what the manufacturer has to say about it. To the best of my knowledge, it is a synthetic substitute for dirt. It’s been around for 30 years in England, and I’ve heard about it several times in the past year or so in the U.S. (I am not noted for following racing, so my not hearing of it until recently should not be taken as an indicator of anything other than recent installation at a track near me geographically).

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Huh? I am not an equine practitioner, but I have euthanized a few horses for friends. Quick catheterization of the jugular vein, inject drug, then get out of the way without getting hurt. The horse is dead in seconds.

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Actually, I’m the large animal vet. Sternvogel was using my computer without logging out again.

Sorry, no, I don’t know what type of shoe he was wearing.

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Sorry, and I would never contradict an expert, I am just telling you what is common practice (and the purported reasons given) around here. I’m sure, and have seen, some fairly quick and painless medically-induced deaths here, I am just saying that shooting horses still happens fairly often. I would also note that our horses, while not in the multi-million dollar Kentucky Derby level, but they many of them are in the tens of thousands range, with stud fees in the thousands, so it isn’t just the “lower tier” horses that are put down via bullet.

Also, here we do not bury horses, we have a community area (as in used by multiple ranching families) where horse (and other large animals’) bodies are disposed of.

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Hey, Long Time First Time. . .are there any new therapeutic options for a horse with heaves/COPD/whatever it is currently called? My GF has an older horse who will be put down soon due to progressively worsening respiratory function. Horse has been on clenbuterol, and DexNaPO4 (as well as all the different husbandry things) but things are deteriorating.
/hijack

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No problem, I am far from an expert.:smiley:
As in all aspects of medicine, differences exist.

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I can confirm it’s fast and appears to be painless. Of course, in both of the cases I’ve seen the horse was already down, so you don’t have the horrible experience of seeing them collapse from the massive dose of sedative/tranquilizer that precedes the heart-stopping drug. Or at least a two-drug protocol was what I’ve observed.

In both cases there was some postmortem rippling of skin and twitching of limbs, but that was the nervous system discharging more or less randomly. The horse was dead already.

The first horse I saw put down did draw an agonal breath – the “death rattle”, a sound I’d prefer never to hear again. From what I’ve read it’s more of a muscle spasm, not something the horse is aware of and suffering.

My own elderly Quarter Horse had to be euthanized after a spinal cord injury last fall. He slipped away from consciousness with the sedative/tranquilizer injection and never even took the agonal breath. Just… gone. I stayed with him through it all and found it comforting to see how peaceful his release was.

Still cry whenever I think of it, of course. Cant’ see the keyboard right now.


Okay, back in control.  One way of "shooting" a horse for euthanasia is called the captive bolt.  It's basically [a pistol that fires a bolt](http://www.adamsguns.com/1730.jpg) a prescribed distance out of its barrel, deep enough to penetrate the skull and instantly destroy sufficient brain tissue to kill the horse.  It has to be applied at exactly the right spot, though, to work properly.  There is considerable controversy over whether it is inhumane.

[This webpage](http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/vetext/INF-AN/INF-AN_EMERGEUTH-HORSES.HTML) discusses the common methods, indications, advantages and drawbacks of various emergency euthanasia methods for horses.
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http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/14645236.htm

the above link is an article in today’s phila. daily news. incase it disappears, the article sites numbers from penn national.

about 26 horses a year have a catastrophic breakdown. a c.b. is one when the horse is dead with 24 hours of the breakdown. about 262 horses have died in the past 10 years according to penn national numbers.

the average 'cross country is 1.6 to 2.2 c. b.s per 1,000 horses.

the numbers are way higher than i expected.

new bolton not only have a way nifty pool but treadmills! one doctor interviewed said seeing a tb on a treadmill is phenom. usually they are out of your view so fast when they run outside, on the treadmill all that power and speed is right next to you.

one concern for barbaro should he recover and try out a new stud career is how the rebuilt leg will handle the stress of mating. his weight will be on the back legs for that. he may have to try something from the horsie karma sutra book.

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Polytrack has now been used through two meets at Turfway Park and the results for the most part have been good. Break-downs are down, trainers say time horses can train has increased because there have been less training injuries. One thing though, the article didn’t mention that Turfway Park runs at night, during the winter, when the ground is often frozen. Turfway Park was an excellent candidate for Polytrack.

Seeing catostrophic break-downs go from 24 to three is great. But there haven’t really been enough studies yet to show that tracks with great weather like California would see the same kind of benefit.

There have been some downsides with polytrack. It is artificial and some horses have had trouble breathing the stuff in. Some jockeys have complained as well. But in Turfway Park’s case, that has been considered a minor problem compared with the danger of horses running on frozen ground.
And even though there is no governing body that covers all of racing, if there was a surface that proved to be better on the horses legs, there would be plenty of reason for tracks to change to it. The owners want horses that can win purse money. When a horse is injured, no chance to win. The trainers main source of income comes from purse money, so they too need sound horses to make a living. So if a new surface is developed that would lead to less injuries, the owners and trainers would prefer to run there. That would lead to bigger fields. Bigger fields lead to more betting. More betting means more money for the tracks. More money for the tracks means more money for purses. So really everyone in racing would prefer to see a new surface that could keep our horses safer and cause less injuries. Well everyone but the handicappers, who like to use track surfaces as a betting angle. But even they would come around if it meant bigger fields so they would also be able to make more money.