Navicular: Not a death knell
August 30, 2010
When I was a teen, my beloved first horse, a Morgan-Quarter cross, started acting like she was walking on egg shells with her front feet, and she was particularly sensitive turning sharp corners. This horse loved to pole bend, and any time she saw poles set up in the arena, her head would come up, her muscles would coil as if she wanted to explode, and all it took from me was the release of the reins, and she would take off at a dead run. She loved poles, and to a lesser extent, the other gymkhana events. Unlike the stereotypical gymkhana horse (note I said, “stereotypical”, not ALL gymkhana horses) she was very quiet and gentle, a consistent winner in Western Pleasure and Trail classes.
I spent many nights crying myself to sleep because I was sure that when the navicular diagnosis came, we would have to put her down. A lot of my angst was teenage dramatics, and none of it ever came true. We changed my mare’s shoeing, slimmed her down, gave her a rest, used bute occasionally, and assigned her lower-impact uses. That mare lived to a ripe old 27 years, ran poles once in a blue moon, taught my daughter to ride, and never even came close to dying or ending her productive life because of navicular. So, if you get the diagnosis, take heart. There are lots of treatment options that allow navicular horses to live well. (Check out the September issue of Horse & Rider
for "Navicular or Not?"
(Karin Livingston is the author of the young-adult horse novel, Winning Bet, available in hard copy and on the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad through the Kindle store.)