Alright in this next lecture we're going to talk about colic and,
you know, just, just quickly, when deciding what to present in this
class, you know, I always try to think how am I
going to make these animals lives better and their animals owner's lives better.
And, you know, two areas I thought that were important
was laminitis, which we already covered and the other was colic.
So, I felt this was definitely worthwhile to take a few minutes to kind of talk
through colic and give you some management tips
on how to limit colic in your animals.
You can read the, the definition right there.
You know, digestive servi, disturbances with, with different causes.
And the key is that this is going to,
this is going to affect about 10% of all horses,
you know, or all equines at some point in
their lives, they're going to have some bout of colic.
And the thing is with colic is, it can result in death.
So it's, it's a very serious disorder that,
you know, we need to pay attention to.
We need to pay, you know, our management with.
Now, you know, what, why do we, we have instance of colic again.
Remember going back to the, the, you know, anatomy of the animal, you know, they're
built to eat small meals all day, and what we've done is we've confined them, so
we've limited the amount of exercise they get,
and we feed 'em, you know, typically two
meals a day, one in the morning, one
in the evening 'because that's easiest for us.
And that's why we start to see the incidence of this a lot higher.
Now, I'd like to take this, you know, study
from Canada, and this is a 10-year study from, from
Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatchewan, and they
have documented their cases of colic from 1992 to 2002.
And they're listing there as you can see the top
nine types of colic that they see in their cases.
And the largest one was impaction followed by displacement and spasmatic.
And those are the three that we'll really
cover in this lecture, and then you can read
up on some of the others to see what they are and, and, and how they come about.
But the bottom line is you know, this does affect horses.
Now, impaction colic is kind of the what people think
what the typical colic and this is where some portion of
the intestine, could be small intestine too, or large intestine,
this is the colon that you're looking at of a horse.
And it becomes impacted and the feed just keeps backing
up, backing up, backing up, not digested and it results in
this very painful condition and they start to get, you
know, the, the lining of the intestine starts to die off.
And you can see that looks, that highly inflamed area where all that feed stuff
just stuffed in there like a big sausage
and it's just really, a really terrible condition.
Now, what can cause that?
It's not just feed.
Things like sand.
So, sand colic, especially here, here in the state of Florida.
You know, we deal with we have sandy soils, and
horses that they're eating off the ground, they'll ingest some sand.
And then that can build up and they get this large, you know, bag of sand.
It would look like that.
They'd be full of sand.
So, one of the things you can do is feed, keep your
feed up off the ground with sandy soils or put in, you
know, some type of container, horse feed bin, you know, or something
they can eat out of, or dish, so they're not ingesting that sand.
Worms, you know, if you don't deworm your animal, they could get worm build up
in their stomachs and they can get blockages
with that and then also undigested feed stuff.