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jenningtons

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Hello, my mare has been behaving really weirdly this past week she is usually so nice and calm wouldnt hurt a fly but all of a sudden shes been bucking madly in her stable and screaming (shes never bucked since we have had her) and then shes even kicked her tack room door into pieces, shes been pinning me in the stable and shes been very difficult to catch in, she looks quite scared and agitated , her routine is normal and nothing has been changed so i do not know what has triggered it , it is really unlike her any ideas??
 
there has been fireworks in the past few days but she was acting like it before the fireworks started and some went of whilst i was there and she didnt seem that bothered :S
 
nothings been painted and we had the saddle lady out and she checked her back so nothings wrong with her back or saddle so thats what i cant understand , she stops bucking once shes out of the stable so this is why i dont think shes injured??
 
I know you said that nothing has changed, but have her turnout hours reduced recently? Its just you say she's difficult to catch in, indicating that maybe she prefers it out? My TB is always more difficult to deal with in winter when her turnout is reduced - the rest of the time she is an angel to handle.

If not, then I would have already called the vet....
 
I think I would get the vet out to be honest, just to check her out. I would be concerned that there is something wrong in her stable, it sounds like something has frightened her and now she just doesn't want to be in there. Maybe ask the YO if there is another stable you could use for the time being?
 
i am concerned and i would call a vet if she did it 24 7 and i thought it was pain related but she only does it in the stable on the morning and occasionally on the evening but she doesnt do it when shes outside the stable at all?? some have said maybe it attention seeking but i dont think shes like that?
 
Are there any rats around in your stable/yard? Have you put a lickit or similar in the stable? Have you changed her treats or any of her feed stuff?
If you can discount all those then get the vet.
 
YorksG said:
Are there any rats around in your stable/yard? Have you put a lickit or similar in the stable? Have you changed her treats or any of her feed stuff?
If you can discount all those then get the vet.
Click to expand...

Rats have started to come in now its getting colder, I found a dead one in back garden yesterday and more mice activity(I usually have twice yearly poison blitz with bait boxes and they are working). BUT I agree with others worth a vet out if you cant work it out, could be anything annoying her. Good luck hope you work it out and she gets back to normal asap.
 
Erm; it's getting colder, and maybe she's not been getting out as much? Also, she IS a horse, which tend to do weird things entirely randomly sometimes?
 
i did think rats and we do occasionally have them and i know she is terrified of small animals but i havent seen any round the yard?? thanks everyone im going to see how she is tommorow if shes done anything in the morning and i am going to call out a vet if shes still like it
 
This sounds exactly like my current girl was! She used to buck in the stable - actually buck, not just kick - but never bucks when ridden, and it was pretty much every single morning. I couldn't tell you how quickly it came on because she did it from day one that I had her. I'd arrive in the morning and as I was walking in people would be coming out the other way saying 'rather you than me'! And you'd go in and she'd look 17.2, agitated, bucking and circling. It wasn't hunger because she always had stacks of hay / haylage. As soon as I brought her out she would literally turn back into a lamb nine times out of ten and a toddler could have led her out to the field.

I couldn't tell you for sure what was causing it, but she doesn't do it any more, and these were the things that we got changed at the time that it stopped.

1) We discovered she had ulcers and had them treated.
2) We eventually discovered she had poll pain - and it took almost half a dozen different back people to find it (in fact it was actually a vet who spotted it which surprised me), so I'd never stop at one opinion any more.
3) We moved yard and she was no longer in an american barn so a) she can see out more easily and b) she won't any more hear horses in the barn behind her or otherwise out of sight getting to go out in the morning before her.

It was the latter which really set her off, as she'd usually be fine until she heard another horse move even just one hoof, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the first two things really causing it otherwise why would it have stopped?

So I'd get her checked and would suggest getting these two ruled out, as well as anything else you or the vet can suggest.
 
Would it be possible to try her in a different stable? Would maybe give you an indication if its something going on in her stable....

ETA - Is she warm enough? She might be getting cold so working herself up to warm up?
 
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philamena said:
This sounds exactly like my current girl was! She used to buck in the stable - actually buck, not just kick - but never bucks when ridden, and it was pretty much every single morning. I couldn't tell you how quickly it came on because she did it from day one that I had her. I'd arrive in the morning and as I was walking in people would be coming out the other way saying 'rather you than me'! And you'd go in and she'd look 17.2, agitated, bucking and circling. It wasn't hunger because she always had stacks of hay / haylage. As soon as I brought her out she would literally turn back into a lamb nine times out of ten and a toddler could have led her out to the field.

I couldn't tell you for sure what was causing it, but she doesn't do it any more, and these were the things that we got changed at the time that it stopped.

1) We discovered she had ulcers and had them treated.
2) We eventually discovered she had poll pain - and it took almost half a dozen different back people to find it (in fact it was actually a vet who spotted it which surprised me), so I'd never stop at one opinion any more.
3) We moved yard and she was no longer in an american barn so a) she can see out more easily and b) she won't any more hear horses in the barn behind her or otherwise out of sight getting to go out in the morning before her.

It was the latter which really set her off, as she'd usually be fine until she heard another horse move even just one hoof, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the first two things really causing it otherwise why would it have stopped?

So I'd get her checked and would suggest getting these two ruled out, as well as anything else you or the vet can suggest.
Click to expand...

Thanks this really helped : what did yours have to have done e.g. ive never heard of poll pain , did she have to have treatment, physio etc?? and it sounds more like the poll pain as for ulcers she hasnt lost appetite or appeared quite tired, diarrohea etc
 
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My horse started bucking and squealing without any obvious cause a couple of years ago. I tried everything I could think of and eventually put it down to temper, which was very unlike him. Anyway going into the winter I clipped him and found lots of small scabs on his back legs where his feathers had been. Vet came in and gave him the mite jabs and this stopped most of it. Unfortunately now he will still buck and squeal in the stable if he thinks he's missing out on anything but it doesn't happen like it did when he first started. I felt awful afterwards knowing it had been upsetting him so much, but he was out on loan at the time and nobody had told me anything about it until I took him home :(

Whatever it is get the vet involved asap because once they develop a habit like this there's no stopping it, and that will cause you more grief in the future. Good luck finding out what it is.
 
Well, because at the same time I'd noticed her saddle slipping to one side, I was having her back investigated. Initially I went through several chiros and physios who tried to relieve tightness elsewhere in the neck and back, and a tilted pelvis (but who hadn't spotted the poll issue which seems to have been the root of it all, some kind of whiplash injury probably from mucking about in the field). With the work on her back and pelvis she did improve a bit but I was not convinced we'd got to the bottom of it. Then when we asked one of the vets to take a view on it when they were taking blood for something else, she mentioned the way the muscles around the poll had tightened and developed unevenly, and she said there's no way to prove it but they believe that muscle issues around the poll can have a similar kind of pathology to the neck issues in people which cause severe headaches or even migraines, and so they often see it associated with erratic behaviour.

Anyway, I took her to see an osteo who works under a vet specialising in musculo-skeletal problems. He used thermal imaging and x rays to get a fuller picture, and found quite a few areas of muscle issues and the x ray showed the tight muscles were holding the bone at the top of the head slightly wonky. To cut a long story short, she has had quite a lot of osteopathy under sedation over the past few months and has been off work while it's sorted. From the first treatment her movement changed, she stopped screwing her back feet as she lifted them which hadn't changed the whole time she'd been being seen by the other back people, and we haven't had any stable bucking tantrums.

I'm a big fan of McTimoney chiropractors and will continue to use them and physios because they do different things... but in this instance she needed something 'more' than that. I was explaining what she'd had and how it had been treated to a McTimoney and they were quite happy to say 'so completely beyond what someone like me would have dealt with then'. So if I hadn't found the people I now use, I'd probably go for a really good Osteopath if I suspected something similar again, as it was an Osteo who got closest to it when we were first investigating, and it's an osteo who's been sorting it since. Since being treated this way she is way, way less sensitive just about everywhere (she was always very reactive, pulling faces and skipping about when you touched her in loads of different places) and definitely a lot more chilled.

I'm not sure if that helps, but happy to give you more details of the people I've used if you want by PM, as you may be able to find similar where you are.

Equally the trantrums could have been the ulcers, which we treated in the typical way of scoping to diagnose then gastrogard and antepsin to clear them and now (hopefully!) managing with a couple of supplements. Really don't assume you need any of those symptoms for ulcers. Mine looked a picture of health, great coat, on the fat side of thin, not stressy in any other way, ate like a horse(!), was managed in a very non-ulcery way, none of the typical stuff. The vet I used for her ulcer treatment is referred to by other vets as 'the man' when it comes to ulcers (ulcer geek, sorry, specialist) and he says they're increasingly finding most ulcery horses DON'T have those signs of not thriving that they originally looked for.
 
Hey I've spoken to the vet twice as she got worse and they think it could be anxiety of being on her own and unprotected in a stable has anyone dealt with this before that has any tips?
 
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