-Severe muscle wastage over the back and hindquarters, either on one side or both sides
- Pelvis appears to 'wobble' when you watch them move from behind
- bad stumbling, sometimes falling over/somersaulting
-drags hind feet badly
-reluctant to move
-looks wobbly and unbalanced, uncorodinated
Not sure what a fresh fracture would look like, above stuff is just my experiences of racehorses that have been in training/racing with severly fractured pelvises
I saw one an hour after a two year old had taken a gate on, hadn't got high enough and turned A over T onto a track. Understandably, it was a bit shocked and looking sorry for itself but other than a couple of scrapes on a fetlock and a hock, nothing to see outwardly and definitely lame but only in an ouchy way, like a pulled muscle or something which is what we thought she had done. Vet checked her that same day within two hours of it happening, no signs to suggest she had done more to herself at all, suggested bute and box rest, would check her again the next day which he did. Only difference was when she moved, you heard the faintest click; if you hadn't had it pointed out to you, you'd never have heard it at all. She was box rested all summer, with bute for the first fortnight but was then taken off it as she had started to move in the box too much; it was safer to have her not encouraged to move. Within a month, the bad side had dropped and muscle wastage appeared which did not start improving again until after she had been turned out six months after the accident. The only medication she had was some bute and some massage once she had stopped being tender on it. While in, she had grown upwards but not outwards, from 15.1 to over 16 hands; she was still quite lame when she was turned out but it was felt a lot of that stemmed from her unevenness and muscle wastage, not the injury which had stopped clicking after about 4 months. She was sound and had evened up just over a year after the injury after growing to 16.2; was put in foal to give her a further 18 months recovery time and then started like any other youngster. As far as I know she is fine but I think you'd always be aware of it and not push her to her limit or state of fitness just as a precaution to be on the safe side.
My mare broke her pelvis when she was a yearling or 2-year-old (I can't remember, sorry) She's now absolutely sound although her pelvis is wonky and one hip protrudes more than the other. I believe broken/fractured pelvises have good prognoses in general.
It's recently come to my attention that they're on the common side in race horses and often a fairly early "go to" for general loss of performance and intermittent unlevelness. (Maybe in performance horses, too, if anyone thinks to look.) I suspect it's one of those things that's always been more common than we think but we lacked the technology to make a definitive diagnosis. It seems, on the whole, like most non-catastrophic bone injuries to be a fairly hopeful prognosis if the horse can be rested for long enough.
The three horses I've known that had severe breaks, where I suspect the fracture was displaced and it was obvious what had happened (one caught under a fence, one jumped a gate and flipped over, one did the splits on ice) did not really heal to a "pre injury" level of usefulness. Two were ridden again but had long term problems, the other never returned to ridable soundness. That said, in all those cases the original injury was so sever I'm sure there was a great deal of other damage to soft tissue so difficult to tell what healed up and what didn't.