That’s good to know. I’ve had to take care of quite a few horses with colic before but none of my vets have ever mentioned that as normal. Here I was poking the manure with a stick trying to decide if it was tapeworms or mucus! It was thick and long - want to see a picture? 
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that is heartbreaking! I am so sorry for your friend
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My horse’s appetite was slow to kick back in and after he came back from vet school he was colicky the next day, The barn vet on exam found a whole bunch of manure was just hanging out in his rectum and not passing all the way through for some reason. It took a week before manure looked normal and was of normal frequency. It was less piles and smaller piles and not defined balls. Agree, I would walk around the paddock counting piles and evaluating consistency. . 
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It really does sound like some sort of viral enteritis.
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Yes, actually! LOL I think others need to see it too, so they don’t totally freak out. Sometimes it even looks a little bloody, depending.
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Picture please!
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They may load out of order. The large poop is from day three, after two observable days of no manure. The small poop is day four. I stopped taking photos of manure after that but each subsequent poop has been similar to the small pile. The pale ropy stuff is the mucus - it broke easily but was several inches long and one part of his manure when broken open even looked almost placental, it was gross.
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Oh yeah, that looks like the others I’ve seen.
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We need to patent a car seat for horsey upset-tummy episodes. “Want to go for a ride? In the car-car? WHO WANTS TO GO BYE-BYE IN THE CAR-CAR?!”
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In all seriousness, thank you for the mucousy/ropey poo lesson. #TheMoreYouKnow
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Seriously! Thirty years of horses and seeing ropy manure from a colic is a first for me. Just goes to show you’re never done learning something new.
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One of the reasons I love COTH, besides you know you’ll be called out for saying something wrong, which is another way to learn.
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Lol! A few months back my horse presented with a HUGELY swollen sheath. Vet came out and treated and asked me to keep her updated via text. You haven’t lived until you find yourself texting your cherished vet on a Sunday morning bright and early a montage of D pics l (and I did tell her here’s your Sunday morning D pick !). I have a strange amount of weird closeups of manure, bugs I’ve found in hay, various other body parts … scrolling through my horse album is eye raising lol Best wishes to Hank !
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I wasn’t being snarky. I misunderstood or misread what she was asking, and so my suggestion to her.
went in a completely different direction. It wasn’t what she was looking for at all.
The updates from her sound like some progress is being made. That’s good news, and as I wrote in my post, I had hoped that would happen.
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Thanks for the clarification, as I too read a good bit of snark in there, sorry! The joys of toneless written words LOL
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Glad the OP’s horse is doing better, it sounds like. I’ve been following this because I have been dealing with a mystery fever with almost no other symptoms (maybe slight pickiness at hay the few days before noticing the fever - just slower to eat it, but still a voracious appetite for grass). I’m in the SoCal mountains - we have ticks but not a lot of Lyme.
I noticed my horse seemed extra sleepy on Monday, Memorial day. I’ve been rehabbing from an apparent stone bruise so we had been doing easy flat rides with boots, working up to 11 mins of trotting so far. Since he seemed extra sleepy and had just done 11 trot minutes the day before, we took it easy with only 2.5 miles of walking and 2 mins of trotting (in intervals, not all at once). It’s been sunny but cool, in the 60s, and when I untacked him in the shady, breezy barn after our super easy ride, he felt like he was burning up - like he had been standing in the hot sun on a scorching day. I took his temp and it was 105.1!! I cold-hosed for 20 mins and it came down to 103.6. Gave banamine per vet text and checked in an hour and it came down to 101.1, stil a little high for him.
We started SMZs the next day; instant blood panel showed some sort of inflammation markers. Gave banamine. Over the course of the next two days, his fever returns like clockwork about 22.5 hours after the second- and third- day banamine doses. Finally, on Thursday, four days after I first noticed the fever, we did an IM Excede shot (plus IV banamine, since my guy reacts to things). 24 and 29 hours after that IV banamine, no fever had returned… and as of 6am this morning (37 hours after last banamine) still no fever. 
In the meantime, a blood panel came back just showing inflammation (need more specifics, of course), and we’re waiting on the “fever of unknown origin” panel. The entire time, he was eating/drinking/peeing/pooping just fine. Do horses just get random bugs with fevers? I’m an AA re-rider, he’s my first horse as an adult, and I tend to freak out and try to find answers and fix every little thing that comes up and it can be such an expensive emotional roller coaster…
ETA: he’s at a small barn with 4 other horses and we started taking their temps 2x daily (and put my horse in isolation); none of the other horses have fevers or other symptoms. My guy has had clear nasal discharge but that’s it - no coughing or sneezing. We went on a weekened trip 3 weeks ago to a friend’s cabin community where he stayed in a large pasture that had been used by other horses, but my friend’s horse was turned out with him and hasn’t shown any symptoms. Anyway, just throwing these anecdotes out there into the Cothosphere.
ETA Part II: Cornell FOU panel revealed EHV-4 - the respiratory herpes virus (non-neurologic). He had gotten flu/rhino back in December and was about 2 weeks shy of his due date for another flu/rhino vax when he came down with the fever (My pony strongly reacts to flu/rhino, so we stagger all his vaccines.) So vaccine efficacy had obviously waned - time to go on a five month schedule perhaps… Odd that the Excede seemed to work even though the infection was viral, not bacterial.
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Glad your guy is feeling better!
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This now seems to be happening in Victoria, Australia. It was on the news yesterday in Qld. Some horses have been lost.
Oh no. That is very scary. Jingles for you and those in Australia.
May I ask when this was ?
I did a search on https://www.equinediseasecc.org/ for a recent case of EHV-4 in California and nothing came back. The default search dates were April 20-July 19, 2023.
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