As the title says, horse had a very mild choke that resolved after about 15 minutes. Waiting to hear back from my vet now that it is a non-emergency.
I’m withholding food ATM but now that food passed very quickly and horse is acting completely normal, would you still feed a certain way, etc?
TIA.
What did he choke on?
Dealt with this at a barn I worked at for a while. We watered down grain/made a mash for a while until the horse could be trusted to not inhale grain.
Personally I would soak feed going forward. But I’m dealing with a population of retired horses. I just don’t want them to choke again, and soaking ensures they don’t.
Alfalfa pellets.
I will definitely soak feed going forward. I don’t normally give pellets to this horse but did today since the weather has been terrible and it was easier to feed pellets than hay in the flooded pastures.
Horse usually just gets a ration balancer but I’m wondering if I should withhold hay for several days like usual choke protocol.
My gelding will “choke” on hay cubes, but all he does is lay down and play dead for 10 minutes. (I stopped giving him cubes).
If your horse choked enough for food to come up the nose, then it likely needs medication (possibly antibiotics and anti-inflamatories) and special care. If your horse was just struggling, then I would still soak food and withhold hay for a while just in case the throat is damaged. (allow it to heal)
Thanks, and no - it was very mild. No nasal discharge or anything outside of her laying down, me getting her up, and her backing up a bit and stretching her neck out a few times. I immediately knew something was wrong when she laid down so I gently massaged the esophagus and then the small lump moved and 10 minutes later she was back to her normal perky self again.
Most chokes will resolve without intervention. It’s when they aspirate that you absolutely need a vet visit for antibiotics. Generally you’ll know because there will be nasal discharge and even detritus from the bolus coming out of their nose. Just about every choke I’ve called the ER vet for has resolved seemingly minutes before the vet rolls up. I’m glad your mare is alright and you managed to break the bolus. It can be very scary.
Isolating how/why the choke happened will help with management going forward. They can be sore for a few days after depending on the size of the bolus and degree of choke. It’s never a bad idea to soak their food going forward especially if they’re the kind to eat fast or you’re feeding from chest height or above. Sometimes changing their food arrangement or placement helps too. If you feed from chest height it may be worth feeding them on a pan on the ground instead. If the choke was prolonged, aspirated, or reoccurring it’s likely there’s scarring on their esophagus and it can make them much more likely to choke going forward. Soaking is a good way to prevent matter from balling up into a bolus.
One year I had a gelding choke out of my own stupidity. My horses are at home. I pulled out my gelding to get him ready for a truck in lesson. I tied him to the twine on our fence line that’s designated for tack up. I didn’t really pay attention (d’oh) but my tall guy had managed to put his neck over the fence and was eating the free-range alfalfa pellets for my other horse on the other side (this horse tended to lose interest in alfalfa but needed all the calories he could get). My gelding must have been positively inhaling them because he choked. Called the vet, felt around for a bolus, couldn’t really break or move it. It was pretty firmly packed. Gelding managed to clear it just as the vet pulled in but we tubed him anyway. Vet was confident he didn’t aspirate anything. It just happened to be the perfect storm of him arching his neck and tucking his head to be able to eat out of the other side of the fence line, and him wanting to eat them as fast as he could before I caught on. That was six or seven years ago. He still eats alfalfa pellets daily… but on the ground. 
It’s pretty common for a horse that’s choked once to choke again soon after. The initial choke can irritate and inflame the esophagus and that can cause the horse to choke again.
So, in addition to soaking the horse’s food for a few days (and maybe dampening the hay as well if you can without it freezing), you might ask the vet about giving the horse banamine to help with any inflammation.
good luck!
What a great and informative post, thank you for that.
I, too, have my horses on my own property. I am also 8 months pregnant so I was waddling around, trying to figure out if she was trying to colic or choke. 
I’m so glad she decided on the latter and that it was so mild. We’ve had non-stop, pouring rain for the past several days and I was betting on colic with how bad the weather has been. She normally does not get alfalfa pellets but I was trying to make things easier considering the terrible weather. I think she just inhaled the pellets. I’m going to feed her everything soaked and sloppy for a few days, eventually give wet hay, some NSAIDs and see how she does.
I’ve dealt with mild choke a few times over the last few months with a mare at my place. It was always very mild, and she cleared it on her own, no calling the vet. I started soaking her food longer, and with more water. She is an anxious horse so I also make sure everything is calm and quiet while she eats. If she came running in for dinner, or seems wound up at all, I hold back on feeding until she’s chill. I have occasionally delayed a meal by an hour or more because there’s something loud going on outside. No problems since.
I’ve also read about feeding horses with some sort of slow feeder, like the grid on the underside of a water trough - flip it upside down and pour the grain into the grid to slow them down. Good luck!
I have an early retiree due to some back/neck/nerve pain (15, he’s been retired since 9 ish) that is a repeat choker as of about 18 months ago. He’s definitely got some sort of stricture right at his throatlatch so he never aspirates, just goes into bad coughing. It does resolve easily with ace/banamine, but I had a few vet visits before I figured that out (it also conveniently started when I was on DL with shoulder sx. I can give a 1 handed IM shot, but not an IV lol).
I’ve always soaked food primarily because it can never be a bad thing to get more water in them, and both of them get ration balancer with some added beet pulp or alfalfa cubes to make it seem like they get more than a handful of feed, I also use ground trays. So I was already doing a choke protocol when it started. No bueno. Even more fun when he was started repeat choking when he had access to hay and nothing else (hay hut/round bale). I was starting to think he wasn’t going to have a long term prognosis. I kept him off hay for a day and fenced him off the hay hut and put his hay on a ground nibble net. I found a net system for hay huts and introduced him back to the round bale with no more chokes, even when I removed the net so they could finish off the last 2 days of the bale.
A full year later someone left an obscure pasture side gate open and at some point in the wee hours of the morning they got out and ate 40 !!! lbs of deer feed at the feeding station, so there was a lot of vet attention, including trying to empty the stomach and oiling. I remembered the stricture and told the vet to use a smaller diameter ng tube (she could still feel it). There were no bad consequences to that buffet except to my wallet… BUT a few days later guess who choked? That’s when the light bulb went off on my head, he hadn’t done those repeat chokes on hay, but because the ng tube really irritated/inflamed the esophagus.
Well, alrighty then… Special horse continues being special. In addition to being an early retiree whose nickname is The Thug for the delightful way he treats his pasture mate, he cribs and is a choker. He also tried to bleed to death when he was gelded and any minor wound is problematic up to and including rejecting stitches. He’s pretty much told me in every way that they will be no extraordinary lifesaving measures if he colics since he’s not sx candidate and now he can’t get an ng tube w/o complications.
I have a similar one, Op. I just stopped feeding him alfalfa pellets. It didn’t matter how much they were soaked, he still would choke. It was mild the first couple times, then a bit worse and I didn’t want a repeat of that stress for either of us. He doesn’t have a problem with regular grain, so I just left it to that & added some cocosoya oil for fat instead. I hate using oil but I sure hated the choking a lot more. No more problems ever since, whew.
I had one that choked multiple times as a 2 and 3yo and all resolved on their own. Pellets or hay 
. Took her in to be scoped to check for stricture. The first one was the worst. Poor thing. I gave her her ration balancer wet down…soupy even. That crap set up like concrete. She had a large lump stuck and when the esophageal spasm hit, she would squeak. It was horrible. I thought she was going to die 
. She seemed to think she was starved all the time and would bolt her food and I think the food bolus would get stuck where the esophagus enters the chest. She did have green gunk come out her nose…it would take about 20 minutes for that to happen once she started looking distressed. Who knows how many times it happened when she wasn’t observed.
I quit wetting the RB pellets (held them for a while) and brought her in out of the pasture and into a dry lot pen. I don’t think she was getting adequate forage in the sparse pasture and was truly hungry a lot (she was clear of ulcers on scope) hence attacking her food. She hasn’t had a choke episode since that I am aware of. She grew up and her chest widened out thankfully.
Anyway, other than withholding food until she was over the episode I didn’t do anything special.
Susan
No real medical type advice, but soaking will always make it go down easier. If you have large rocks like river rock sized, you could put a couple of those in her feed pan/bucket for her to lick the feed up around them. Basically slowing her down from inhaling the soaked feed with a pretend diy horse sized kong feed bowl lol. Good luck with your mare and the prenancy congrats mama!!!
Thank you 
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