# My yearling filly is looking....bizarre!



## Harmony_Meadows (Nov 4, 2007)

It has been a crazy few weeks, so I haven't really messed with her much...she got a bit of time off for good behavior! Today I hauled her in and took a really good look and YIKES!! She looks like the stuff I shoveled off the barn floor! She had a massive growth spurt about a month ago....almost a full hand difference between front and back! So I was expecting her to be a bit ribby, which she still is as the front slowly catches up. She was also starting a bit of a pot belly, and the bot flies have been atrocious this summer, so I am really not surprised at that either. So, I had upped her grain and wormed her with Quest and figured that would do the trick.....:umno: Today, she has a worse belly, still some ribs showing, but now she is getting fat pads along her crest, her withers and around the loins. She also has a nice valley along her back and big old butt! Ooookay! Cut back the grain! That one is easy. It is the belly that has me stumped. I am hoping to take a fecal to the vet next week, but I really don't want to overworm her. I suppose it could be hay, although they are getting great hay (was analyzed and got top marks for quality! The tech's exact words were awesome!) but they are free fed from a horse ring style feeder. They use small squares and toss out every other day or so. Just not sure where to go from here, other than wait to see what is lurking in her poop! Any suggestions??? Please!!! :help: Thanks!!! Camera has been down and this weekend is insane ( my 2 year old's birthday party and a horse show!!) so you will all have to wait until Monday to see what she looks like!


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## wr (Aug 10, 2003)

Are you judging her condition objectively or by how you feel she should look? Take a deep breath, give your wormer more than a day to do its thing, certainly have a fecal done and take it from there.


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## Harmony_Meadows (Nov 4, 2007)

I really wish I was wr, but she looks pregnant again! Which is not possible! (I hope!) No one has said anything about wayward studs to me, so I have to go on not. I had actually upped her feed before more so because of the large growth spurt. It was only today that I realized it really wasn't necessary. Might even need to drop the grain intake a bit more or switch the mix....still looking into that aspect. But she really is very round! I suppose it could be overfeeding, but then why would her ribs be so obvious? I think I need to just stop thinking for a few hours, see what the fecal and you all say and come back at it with a fresh perspective. Breathe...remember wr says breathe!!  Thanks!!


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## southerngurl (May 11, 2003)

She may just be eating plenty to feed that growth. They have all kinds of stages sometimes. 

Here is my horse Zip as a yearling. He had the belly, the ribs, you can see how downhill he was, he's standing slightly UPhill- poor little guy was a dork. :hysterical:









As a five year old:


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## Stonybrook (Sep 22, 2007)

Youngsters take weird spurts and sometimes they just look hideous because of their growth patterns. I wouldn't get excited yet.


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## wr (Aug 10, 2003)

Harmony_Meadows, what you people call grain and what I call grain seems to have different meanings so perhaps you could tell me specifically what you are feeding. Realistically, your hay tested well so that's a good thing and I'm going to assume that since you went the the effort of having your hay tested, she probably has mineral and salt available.

Take an another objective look at her. You didn't mention anything about her looking dull or limp. Does she seem energetic, have bright eyes and a smooth coat? They honestly go through phases where they look just terrible but very few don't look like crap a few times before they fill out.


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## Horseyrider (Aug 8, 2010)

WR makes a good point about the hay. Youngsters lack the ability to fully digest fibers like hemicellulose, and no horse digests lignin well. (Cows do, but they have three more stomachs.) The more mature the hay plant when harvested, the higher percentage of hemicellulose and lignin. Your hay tested awesome, which is great; but what a mature horse can digest is not the same as what a youngster can digest. They lack the maturity in the cecum when young, and even when it's ready to do business, they may lack the digestive enzymes and bacteria to do a thoroughly effective job. 

Babies with the above situation and mature horses with coarser hay or forage can get some pretty prodigious hay bellies. If you could look inside, you'd find the gut lined with undigested fiber. I recall one source saying that a horse can carry around as much as fifty pounds of this. Imagine a trim tummy with a fifty pound bag of feed strapped on.

If your worming program has been thorough, it's not likely to be worms. Do a fecal if it makes you feel better, but I'd suggest a quality pre-biotic/probiotic formula like Pro-Bi. It contains both the bacteria you want, as well as food for it to get started. It's activity was described to me like this by one veterinarian-- Remember in your high school biology classes how you'd use an agar dish to culture bacterias? Well, Pro-Bi turns the horse's gut into a giant agar dish. They cannot fully digest the fibrous matter without the right bacteria; so this gives the guts a jump-start.

I also feed something called ABCs Fortified by Advanced Biological Concepts. My babies eat it from their mother's feed pan, and as soon as they're weaned they get their own. Since starting with ABCs, I've never had a baby with a big hay belly; they're lean and trim, like young adult tummies. I put every training horse that came into my barn on ABCs too; and within a few weeks owners were remarking on how bloomy their coats were, and how great their overall condition had become. Made me feel pretty good that they went away feeling that their beloved horses (and their investments) were in good hands.

Now, all that said, downhill horses have a little bit of a structural disadvantage. When they're downhill, they have a butt high appearance that causes the hip angle to slant down more steeply, which hikes up the point of the hip and causes the loin to slope downward. So what happens to the guts underneath? They're unceremoniously dumped forward, and look a lot bigger than they really are. One way of evaluating this is to measure with a stick with a level on a cement pad. Check out the butt height, and subtract the wither height. So your colt's butt is three inches higher? Okay, then stand his front feet on a step or ledge that elevates the forehand by three inches, and watch the change in his posture. A lot of that gut 'disappears.' The greater the discrepancy, the greater the appearance of the gut.

Isn't it funny when they go through that stage where they look like two different horses hooked together? The good news is sooner or later, virtually all of them outgrow it. 

One wise old horseman I used to know said that in order to get a true picture of the horse, you look at it three times-- at three days, three months, and three years. Sure is true....


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## ShyAnne (Jun 18, 2008)

I understand!!
My foal did the same thing, he was hard to keep weight on, gangly was a complement. He went through some pretty dorky stages. He constantly looked wormy, fecal samples were clean. I just worried myself to death. At one point his hind end looked like it belonged on a different horse. It was terrible. He is going on 2 and has evened out so much this past summer. He is gaining weight more evenly, and is looking more like a horse should LOL. I cant wait to see him in a year!


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