Running a horse on long term painkillers

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toomanyhorses26

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My 9 year old tb mare was diagnosed with OA in both hock rated as moderate to severe :( she had quite high levels of bute to begin with 2 morning and evening as a starting point. She is now down to one a day and she still seems to be happier in herself (more friendly and less aloof) and I am due to start riding her to see if the reactions she was showing are still there which could suggest the pain is still present. The vet wants me to take her down to half a sachet a day for the week I start riding to see what sort of level she may need. I am undecided whether I am happy to ride her on painkillers and what the long term helath implications maybe for her?
 
I worked a horse for several months on significant doses of bute, but she was much older than yours. It was with the plan of keeping her ticking over for a while until things got so bad that she was also lame on bute at which point it was time for her to be pts. I have no problem with working a horse on bute myself, we were both happier that way.

Large doses of bute did seem to upset her digestion a bit initially. As the vet and I both knew the situation would deteriorate within months I did not have her liver function checked.

I know someone else who kept their horse going for several years on 1-2 sachets a day.

Hope that's the kind of input you were looking for.
 
Thank you - exactly what I was after . This si my moral issue as such - she is young and needs fairly hard riding as she is a bit of a livewire but then how much of this has been her way of coping with the hocks and how much is her I don't know. She seems ok with the bute and hasn't shown any negative signs since being put on it - my vet is planning on moving her to danilon if we decide that long term painkillers is the way forward. They seem keen to go downthis road but joint injections have been mentioned but I am of the understanding that once I start this I need to continue it
 
Can I suggest that you don't rule out the injections straight away? One horse I owned had a course of Adequan, and with a certain amount of careful management and supplements stayed sound for ten years. However, with the mare I described before I tried steroids and hyaluronic acid into the joint itself and although it was very successful it only lasted six months and she felt so much better she went hooning around in the field and went lame somewhere else. So it might be worth discussing options, although the steroids into the joint thing cost £500 and I didn't consider a second go at it.

If your horse goes sound on bute, where is the harm in working a sound horse? I'm not one for field ornaments tbh, so personally I am in favour of keeping a horse sound and in appropriate work for as long as possible. Not everyone will agree with me!
 
I had this problem facing me with my older boy. He had his hocks injected but was still uncomfortable and was sore in his SI from compensating for hocks. I opted for accupuncture as a source of pain relief, he isn't on any bute at all now unless we do a lot of fast work or jumping in which case I pop one in his dinner just incase. He had 3 sessions 2 weeks apart initially and then one every few months as a top up. It's been so good I have my other horse done now too for his neck issues and have seen good results.
 
I cant have a field ornament - I guess my issue with this whole thing is her age, whether her reaction remains (the vet has said she may have learned pain as such so even if it doesn hurt she may be expecting it ) and whether she will be able to do the work she has needed traditionally to keep her brain in check
 
I rode a horse on bute for around 6 years. That's 6 years where he would otherwise have been an extremely bored field ornament and I would have had no riding horse. Took us a while to get a dose he was comfortable on and to get him fit enough to stay consistently sound but he went back to doing pretty much everything he had done before ie hacking, general schooling and popping small fences. I initially had my reservations about riding a horse on bute and for a few years I refused to have him anywhere near a fence (he sorta made that decision for me by towing me around a field where jumps were set up and more or less dragging me over one of them). He was 12 when diagnosed and was PTS at age 18 when his arthritis progressed to a point where nothing was helping anymore (we tried the steroid injection as well when the bute stopped working but effects only lasted about a month).
 
My mare was diagnosed with hock oa last year it is apparently mild but she was horrible rearing and spinning, we medicated both hocks and her SI joint and the first lot lasted about a year, she had them again in march and she is brilliant at the moment. Painkillers do not help her at all. I figured that as long as the injections dont need doing more frequently than every 6 months at £350 I dont mind as it improves her quality of life so much, we are now back to jumping and fast work, and she is back to being a pleasure to own.
 
I have a 25 year old with arthritis in both hocks, he has 2 sachets of bute during the winter and I drop it off to 1 a day in the summer when it's warm. I also had his hocks injected at the start of the winter and it made a huge difference to him and I'll do that again before winter this year. He's hacked lightly and I keep him out as much as possible. the medication keeps him happy and in work, whereas if he was completely retired and off medication, I'm sure he would deteriate very quickly. If the Bute is affecting his liver I think it's the price I'm prepared to pay to have a happy horse for perhaps a shorter time. When it's clear that the medication is not keeping him comfortable he'll be pts, hopefully after a lovely summer!
 
The way my vet looks at it, you either ride them on bute, or throw them in a field and retire them. Bit of a no brainer to me, especially if the horse is on minimal dosage. I believe it can takes years for bute to affect the internal organs and its only the equivalent of us taking paracetamol or aspirin for our aches and pains.

The problem comes when you have to up the dose in order to maintain soundness that it becomes an issue. I sometimes give my horse a sachet of bute to keep him comfortable in order to go jumping, or take part in a fun ride, and my vet is happy to continue to prescribe this for me. I don’t see it as an issue. My horse is sound without bute, albeit arthritic when I first start trotting but any unlevelness disappears within a lap of the arena. I usually bute if I am going somewhere where a surface is known to be hard, or unyielding and my horse could be uncomfortable as a result.

I wouldn’t give bute to ‘mask’ a problem as that is counter productive, and could cause sufficient harm to render something small into something catastrophic by doing so. But I don't see an issue with buting a horse, my goodness I wouldn't function without 8 co-codamol most days of the week!
 
Danilon has better health aspects- doesn't upset digestive so much and doesn't cause ulcers, a lot of them eat it more readily aswell!
 
Jenko said:
Danilon has better health aspects- doesn't upset digestive so much and doesn't cause ulcers, a lot of them eat it more readily aswell!
Click to expand...

Sadly the thought that Danilon is significantly kinder on the stomach / gut is being revised somewhat now. They originally thought it was about its direct impact on being in contact with the stomach, but now they reckon that the negative effects happen after it's gone into the bloodstream, and that the two aren't so different in their impacts on susceptible guts. I also think it depends massively on the horse: some get digestive discomfort very quickly on NSAIDs, others can go on for ages. Mine, it turns out, is super sensitive and her ulcers recurred after just a week on Danilon (with some muscular pain to go with it which really won't have helped) but she was previously fine on two weeks of bute last year. Equally there are some people on NSAIDs quite long term, whereas when they gave them to me after a shoulder fracture a couple of months ago, my stomach felt dreadful within one dose. Made me think more carefully about what it might feel like for some horses.
 
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