Is it best to shave the legs if I plan to poultice regularly? I would love to hear what people do on a regular basis to keep their horses legs tight.
Poulticing “draws” and cools. It is useful to draw out infection or bruising from a wound. But if you use it “regularly” in an attempt to make legs look “tight” you will find that skin will react to constant dampness, break open, ooze serum, like mud fever. It isn’t something that needs to be used “regularly”, nor should it be IMO. Shaving the legs won’t make a difference with this.
Legs that are “tight” are due to a lack of inflammation or injury, or accumulation of fluid in pockets from previous injury, old or new injuries. With new injuries that you haven’t discovered yet, slight filling in a joint or tendon is your first clue that it is there (often before lameness actually shows up), a trainer does not want to miss this when inspecting legs prior to planning exercise or competition.
Horses legs remain tight and cool when they are well fitted up, get lots of exercise, and have avoided injury. Old strains or injuries may have stretched out joint bursas previously, and a joint which has was previously injured may not come back as tight as it used to be. If healing is complete and successful, this residual filling is not a soundness issue. Pressure applied with standing bandages can temporarily reduce it for cosmetic purposes. But there are other issues and dangers involved in applying pressure with bandages, potential for damage to soft tissues. So there is a risk involved in attempting this.
Making legs “look tight” doesn’t help the horse stay sound, there are risks involved in attempting to do this for cosmetic reasons.
2 Likes
If they stay in at night our vet just has us dry wrap them to help keep them small, we’ve only done it on one horse during the day. You just have to be careful when wrapping them consistently, that you don’t just abruptly stop. You have to wean them off.
Honestly just don’t poultice regularly. With my 3-4* horses, the routine was 99% nothing. With the 15 and 16yr old Olympic and WEG/Pan Am horses we used Arnica gel, but only after jumping at shows.
My initial response is similar to the above: If your horse’s legs aren’t tight/have troubles on a regular basis, then there’s an underlying issue that should be evaluated. (Is the horse working too hard in condition that isn’t ready to support the effort? Is there a soundness situation? Metabolic? Is the horse not getting enough turn-out/movement?)
Poulticing regularly isn’t beneficial to this purpose. What’s described above sounds more like the “sweating” that you hear people do on halter horses - purely cosmetic.
The best ways I’ve found to keep legs tight (especially on some of the older ones that might be prone to stocking up in high heat or humidity, as we’re experiencing now) - lots of turn-out. Make sure you aren’t overworking your horse for the fitness level they’re at. Have a long warm up and cool down to each ride. I’ll even cold-hose legs after hard schooling rides (or rinse the horse with a bucket of water that has a cap-ful of liniment to promote blood flow). The only time I’ll use wraps over something (liniment or poultice) is after an exceptionally hard ride/work - a show where they’re ridden harder than typical (2-3x a day instead of once), or jumping harder/higher than standard.
And the of course, if I see that there’s some disfiguration in the legs, identify if it’s just fluid from stocking up that can be alleviated with movement, or if it’s an underlying indication of injury or other issue that requires more serious intervention. Swelling is a helpful diagnostic - either for how you’re keeping your horses, or of injury, and it’s useful to be able to use.
1 Like
