I thought this was very interesting. The horse I had that rubbed his head on the ground (among many other symptoms) was considered for this study. I opted out of it because they couldn’t take him for a few months and he was pretty miserable at the time. And he was quite over all the vet appointments. Part of me wishes he could have been part of it because I will always wonder. But we do the best we can at the time.
Anyways, I was able to get a hold of the actual link to the study and it was super thorough. I will see if I can figure out a way to post the actual study. Basically these horses exhibited weird and erratic and dangerous behavior but most diagnostics did not find much. The actual root cause could not be found until necropsy.
Think of how many people have a horse that exhibits behaviors and simply just has their chiropractor out to check on them and deems them fine and just naughty? Or the people that just x-ray one or two things find nothing and carry on. This just shows that sometimes you might not be able to find the cause but that does not mean nothing is wrong. I’m assuming this condition is not very common at all but I still think more and more we are finding things that cannot be found easily until after death unfortunately.
