Not sure if this will make you feel better or worse… I’ve had a horse for 3 years. After purchase shipment was delayed due to a cough. Course of antibiotics and cleared to ship. Intermittent cough after eating and at start of excercise, sometimes mild sometimes severe. As in we’ll just walk today severe. We have done allllll the things. Cough gets better and worse regardless of any parameter we can understand. Severity of the cough does seem to have reduced over time. Currently the only medication he is on is Ventipulmin the night before and morning of a foxhunt. Of course Ventipulmin is currently unavailable, I had a stash from another horse. All you can do is listen to the horse. If he acts ok, go on. If he is having trouble breathing, rest and/or treat. Good Luck!!
Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay, I’m a florist and the holiday season is pretty busy.
So I’ve started feeding him on the ground, I thought it was helping but he coughed while eating this morning. Sigh…
Knowing others have a nagging cough they can’t kick, but can still have a functional horse is encouraging. I’m going to try supplements, looking into CEP Daily Lung.
I agree on the nebulizer not really working. I mean I’m glad I have it now, it helped with the treatments, but for maintenance I’m not seeing any change.
He was on the inhalers for 8 days. Twice daily for the first three, then once daily for the remaining five.
What’s further boggling my mind is that I was reading the care plan again and noticed, at our follow up he still had this cough. We did a BAL and the results indicated that he wasn’t in a flare-up (asthma). So maybe either the cough is his new normal due to the asthma, a supplement will help OR it is the hay…
I’ll keep everyone posted. If anyone has any other ideas, throw them by way.
I did have an old farmer tell me to just give him
Buckleys and be done with it. Hmm…
I pulled a horse of mine from a lease situation because he was a mess when I went to see him. He came home with a cough, not heaves, just a cough a few times/day. I put him on Omega Alpha’s Respi Free and it cleared up very quickly and that was the end of it. Might be worth a try?
For the last two years in the summer one of mine had a cough that wouldn’t go away until around September. So it was an allergy of some sort. The first year he had about three months off because he couldn’t be ridden without coughing. He’d also cough randomly on the cross ties and during turnout. We tried clembuterol (sp?), supplements, and various other vet prescribed treatments without any luck. He was scoped but all the vet could see was minor redness in his throat. Lungs were good.
This May he started coughing and I was like oh here we go again. He also had a sinus infection of sorts because there was a lot of nasal discharge. My vet said she’d had luck with another client’s horse with Aleira by Arenus. Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to get over the border (I’m in Canada) and got stuck there for a month. But at the end of June we tried it and within a week the cough had subsided significantly. It’s now used by a couple of the other horses at my barn as well.
It is expensive. I can’t remember the exact price but to buy it and send it to Canada it’s was something like $400 (CAD) and some for the bigger container. Luckily I only need to use it for a few months every year.
It is also stinky and with some horses you need to gradually introduce it. They even recommend airing the container it before giving it to the horse. If you breathe it in, you really feel it going into your sinuses!
Here’s the link:
Equine Respiratory Supplement | Arenus® Animal Health
