Might spaying this mare help??

[Grasshopper]

So I have a mare who, though she has been challenging in some other ways, is super talented and is now lots of fun…except for a couple of days whenever she comes in heat. I’m getting a little desperate for a solution.

SYMPTOMS/ISSUE: When she comes in heat, she is not mean or bad. Rather, she seems like she can’t help having to squat and wink rather than move forward, especially when I try to ride her and put my leg on. She also gets very touchy-feely and moves into pressure rather than away. Even from the ground, she looks almost like she’s tying up in terms of her inability to move forward. IF I can get her going forward, then she is ok (not great, and rather stiff in her back, but ok) but as soon as I bring her down from a trot, she gets stuck again. Trainer agrees it’s physical, not behavioral.

THINGS WE’VE TRIED: Various supplements–nada. Depo–that helped last year (she’d still come in heat but it was manageable) but isn’t doing much this year. Ultrasounded and appears to be clear of ovarian cysts.

I talked with my vet about spaying, and he’s happy to do it but it’s so rarely done, he doesn’t have a whole lot of info on what to expect afterwards. I may try a month or two of Regumate to confirm that the issue goes away if we keep mare out of heat, but I’m not willing to use it long term as I have my horses at home, along with an 8-year-old daughter, and I don’t want to expose either myself or her to the potential hormone implications.

Help! Experiences with spaying or any other potential solutions welcome!!

[hank]

Spaying might solve your problems completely. BUT!! It is such a rare surgery if it were my horse, I would get several opinions, and have the actual surgery done at a teaching hospital. Too many complications to consider doing it at the local large animal clinic.

[CHT]

Try Regumate. Also removing ovaries might be a better option (I am doing that with my mare this fall…meanwhile she is on Regumate). Removing ovaries is done with them standing, so less risk than a full spay.

[Scribbler]

You can syringe Regumate onto the top of the grain, no direct contact.

[alibi_18]

@Scribbler

You can syringe Regumate onto the top of the grain, no direct contact.

Someone has to handle the serynge, the feed bucket as to be cleaned, just holding the damn little regumate bottle is anoying.
And that is if the mare will eat her food with it on top… not my mare.

And there’s a kid… This is not just your regular medication.

@Grasshopper

I tried regumate for my mare to fix some issue not at all like the ones you have but just to say that after 1-2 weeks, she became like a fire breathing dragon. Rolling her neck like a stallion, prancing and you could see the white from the side of her eyes bulging out… Not funny at all. She was scary to ride… I stopped it right then and she came back to her normal self level of nastiness.
Beware of the side effects.

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[Raincityrider]

I understand this does not work for all mares but have you spoken to the vet about trying a marble. It might be worth a trial before commiting to something as serious as surgery. If it works for her you would get a semi long term solution without handling any potentially nasty meds.

[BeeHoney]

There is also an injectable form of altrenogest as an alternative to oral regumate.

[Scribbler]

@keysfins

Regumate dosing pump will work nicely:

https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=1e7ef63f-40dd-42b1-9b38-307237a4cc62

Costs about $60, and wear gloves when setting up. We have mares on Regumate/generic altrenogest, and the dosing gun makes handling it a non-issue.

That’s a nice object.

My mare would eat the Regumate top dressed so it didn’t really mix into the mash. I added it at the last minute to the mash in the feed pan. The only thing with potential contamination would be the feed pan which gets licked clean and hosed out from time to time.

I think you could warn 8 year old off playing with the feed pan and keep the drugs up on a high shelf along with the Bute and DMSO and dormosedan and other dangerous things.

[J-Lu]

Are you going to breed this mare? If not, consider an ultrasound of her follicles/uterus and spaying.

My good friend had a mare that was known to “act out” and be aggressive sometimes. Not always, sometimes. She tried Regumate plus a number of other things. Long story short, she took her horse to the state vet school for ultrasound and discovered a very enlarged (8x or so enlarged) follicle. They all suggested removing the one follicle, but noted the other could develop a tumor, and recommended removing both follicles. My friend did this and her mare stopped having hormone issues.

The surgery to remove both follicles was rather easy on the horse.

I used Regumate in the past, and if you use gloves and good sense, it’s not a problem.

[keysfins]

@J-Lu

Are you going to breed this mare? If not, consider an ultrasound of her follicles/uterus and spaying.

My good friend had a mare that was known to “act out” and be aggressive sometimes. Not always, sometimes. She tried Regumate plus a number of other things. Long story short, she took her horse to the state vet school for ultrasound and discovered a very enlarged (8x or so enlarged) follicle. They all suggested removing the one follicle, but noted the other could develop a tumor, and recommended removing both follicles. My friend did this and her mare stopped having hormone issues.

The surgery to remove both follicles was rather easy on the horse.

I used Regumate in the past, and if you use gloves and good sense, it’s not a problem.

Greatly enlarged follicle? Or greatly enlarged ovary? A persistent anovulatory follicle can get fairly sizable, but will eventually regress, as far as I understand. Or, an option to use meds to jumpstart a true cycle to produce a breedable follicle, or simply to re-set the cycle.

If you meant ovary/ovaries, that would make more sense. One form of spaying is removing just the ovaries, vs removing the whole reproductive tract.

[Grasshopper]

This is a little late, but I just wanted to say thank you to all for your thoughts and let you know what I decided–I’ll try to remember to post again with any developments!

I did discuss the marble with my vet, but there are various significant downsides that caused us to rule it out as an option for this mare.

I had her ultrasounded a couple years ago for enlarged ovaries but they appeared normal.

I have decided to use the Regumate for a few months while I focus on training and showing, and see how she does. If things go well then we’ll plan to spay her this fall/winter. The spay procedure itself would be laparoscopic and done standing (removing only the ovaries), with a fairly quick recovery, but we are in Florida and it’s summer, so I’d rather wait for cooler weather since it’s not an emergency. I just got the bottle of Regumate, but haven’t started it yet as we’re going to be out of town for a long weekend and I don’t want the farmsitter having to deal with it. Will start it when we get back.

If anyone else is considering spaying, it’s not super expensive–less than a new saddle (of which this mare has had a couple due to her shapeshifting nature!).

[rememberthenight]

The BLM is running a spayed mare project. There will be a series of videos coming out- one is out so far and seemed very interesting. I rode a spayed mare, and she was much more sensible without her ovaries, than with them. She still had opinions, but was no longer in pain and so was a happy working partner again.

I own a turners syndrome mare (only one X chromosome) so she does not have a functioning reproductive system. It was a big surprise, but may be a bonus in the end. She rides very similar to the average gelding. Less hormones to deal with, but the bonus that mares tend to be less goofy!!!

[Montanas_Girl]

FYI: Spayed mares display signs of “heat” continuously after surgery, typically. In your case, that sounds like the opposite of what you’d want to do! Most teaching hospitals and collection facilities keep a spayed mare around as a “jump” mare so they always have something on hand that will display for the stallion.

[leheath]

My mare is having her ovaries removed on Tuesday. Regumate effectively suppressed her clearly pain-related, dangerous behavior for a year, but then seemed to stop working earlier this year. When the vet did the ultrasound, she had way too many large follicles on both ovaries and blood work showed unusually low progesterone levels. The cost of the procedure is approx. 2 years worth of regumate, so a good investment for a 7 year old performance horse I don’t intend to breed (I’m an adult amateur with a busy career and who boards, so breeding really isn’t practical). There is a local teaching hospital that will be doing the surgery. They keep the mare for 3-5 days after the procedure, then the horse is supposed to be rested for another ~2 weeks. Then they can go back to work gradually. Frankly, the prep seems worse than the recovery (limited hay for 1 day, then no hay or pasture for 3 days and only limited grain!).

Both my vet and the hospital indicated that mares can still cycle/have hormones after an ovariectomy (which is fine with me as I’ve never had problems with hormone-caused behavior, just pain-caused behavior from follicles on the ovaries, we think!) but did not mention the mare continuously showing signs of heat after surgery as a common side effect, so while this might happen occasionally, it certainly wouldn’t appear to be the norm.

[Grasshopper]

Thank you for your input, @leheath ! Would you be so kind as to update here on how it goes for your mare?

[leheath]

@Grasshopper will do.

[Kyrabee]

I had a mare spayed many years ago. It worked very well. She was having pain issues when in heat. They were getting worse as time went on. She also was taking out her painfulness on her pasture mate trying to savage him a couple of times…she hurt and she definitely thought it was his fault:grief:. This was a gelding she had lived with for several years so the change of behavior was pretty dramatic. Under saddle, when she was in heat she was very unhappy. Stiff, would kick out at the leg, cantered when asked to trot, trotted when asked to canter…just generally unpleasant. Not normal at all for her as I started her myself and until the spring of her 5 y.o. year, I never had any performance issues with her at all. When she went out of heat, it was like a switch was flipped and my cooperative partner returned. It took me until about July when I realized the nastiness was happening on a cyclic basis.

This was way before the advent of laparoscopic surgery. The vet I took her too actually developed his own procedure where he made an incision on each side of the udder and could visualize and remove the ovary on each side (2 incisions). The other procedures at the time were “blind” and could have some pretty significant complications, including death. My regular vet would not even consider the surgery as the last one he tried, the mare bled to death. I had him refer her to another vet as she was quickly becoming unrideable. She was at the vets for 4 days and confined to a small paddock (30 x 12 ish) for 30 days then slowly back to work. She had a solid lyomyosarcoma on the left ovary. It was about 3x normal size and I suspect when she formed a follicle, it hurt like crazy. She did continue to cycle and had light heat cycles but obviously, nothing would have happened had she been bred…if she would have allowed that. That cycling never affected her performance.

Laparoscopic surgery that is done now is much safer with quicker recovery. I don’t think it is done every day but I don’t think spaying is that rare.

Good luck with your mare.

Susan

Susan

[TCA_Arabians]

Barring a problem that shows on an ultrasound - an old trick was copper pennies in their water bucket. We had a mare that would bang the barn when in season. I bought some copper pipe tubes and dropped them in her bucket. It was night and day for her. No more banging.

[leheath]

Thought I would update…my mare had her surgery on Wednesday and was cleared to come home today (although I’ll bring her home Sunday instead of tomorrow due to weather issues). She has 2 small (~1") incisions on each flank/hip. The prep was tough for all involved and, despite starving her another 1.5 days after arriving at the hospital, she still had food in her digestive system at the time of surgery, making the procedure take longer. Still she came through it well - showed signs of pain the day after surgery, but has been making speedy progress since then and is back to regular diet and drinking well. She needs no stall rest when home (but not full pasture turnout until the staples are removed 2 weeks after surgery) and can be ridden (lightly to start) a week after the staples are out.

The surgeon that did the operation is a specialist in this procedure and has done hundreds of ovariectomies. His diagnosis was that my mare just has really over active ovaries, similar to polycystic ovaries in humans, probably due to a hormone imbalance of some kind (one huge follicle on each ovary, plus several small ones, even on a higher regumate dose) and he felt the probability of this being the cause of our issues/the ovariectomy being successful was quite high.

Will update again in a few weeks as recovery progresses.

[Grasshopper]

Good to hear, leheath, thank you for the update!