> old man who gave him to me said one time he was down >really bad and he > oiled him and it was SIX DAYS before he >had a bm and the oil came out. > He said he nearly lost him every single day of the six days. he >said he > thinks GB gets "inflamed cecum" which blocks him. >That is probably bull > but heck I dont know! Do you have any >clues why Trigger was blocking > like this?? Why any horses >get blockage?? > Janice--
Trigger was blocked in the transverse colon. The large colon is 10-12 feet long and has several turns, so impaction colics are more common there. The cecum is a pouch that ferments hay, if a diet change is made too quickly, the bacteria in the cecum don't have time to adapt and the food doesn't get broken down well so it is more likely to cause a blockage as it moves along. Horses are designed to eat small amounts of roughage all day long and when we feed them for our convenience 2-3 times a days, it ups the odds for trouble. That said, horses on 24/7 turnout have better odds, because they're keeping active. I assisted in two colic surgeries in Ca. where a lot of horses are fed straight alfalfa and/or bran and both of those horses had enteroliths (stones that form around a foreign object in the horse's intestines). One we took out of a 28 yr. old Arab was as big as a coconut! Our problem probably was we had a minor diet change, but I did it gradually, but the vet thinks that when the weather turned warm suddenly for three days, Trigger might have been too lazy to hike down to the spring fed stock tank and didn't get enough water. Cherie
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