I haven’t posted much about Prize lately because I would just start contradicting myself all over and confuse you about the status of her feet.

“She’s better. No, she’s worse. False alarm, all better. Wait….”

I finally got annoyed with this and called a professional. This morning I met with a vet who sees lots of foundered horses to get an aggressive rehab plan.

I proudly reported that Prize has lost about 200 lbs. The vet doubled over laughing. Ok, so she looked like a tick previously. She’s better now.

She’s now on multiple meds that she is of course refusing to eat voluntarily. She is going to get some padded glue on shoes instead of her boots for a while. For right now though we went super high tech. She has foam board duct taped to her feet. This will conform perfectly to her feet for support until we can get the shoes on.

The duct tape is where I came in handy. I went to vet school in Appalachia. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to explain that I was taught to make beautiful duct tape foot bandages. The barn owner taped one foot while I was talking to the vet. He was looking at it dubiously when I walked over. I then demonstrated my technique that involves making a weave of duct tape on the stall wall and peeling it off. The weave goes on the bottom of the foot and you wrap the ends up around the top. Wrap some more strands of duct tape around the hoof and it will stay through anything. He looked at me funny. “You learned this IN VET SCHOOL?” I don’t know why he was surprised when the other vet (from another school) recommended foam board. LOL

It is eventually going to sink in that $250 of specialized boots are sitting in the tack room while she wears $1 worth of foam board and duct tape on each foot.