The (Tennessee) Walking Cure
Dr. Amelia Munsterman was just beginning the evening shift at the Auburn University John T. Vaughan Large Animal Teaching Hospital on a muggy Friday in June. Looking across the steaming blacktop parking lot, she watched a horse trailer with Florida plates approach. Inside the trailer was Magic, a 10-year-old Tennessee walking horse. Magic is a striking horse. Sixteen hands high — five-feet, four-inches at the base of his neck — he is deep black with white feet. But, what struck Munsterman and the staff first was his gait. Magic favored his right front leg. A deep gash marred his left.
Still, he seemed in good spirits, said Dr. Elizabeth Yorke, an equine surgery resident.
“The horse didn’t act like he was unwell,” she said. “He was still bright, looking around.”
But Magic wasn’t well; Tennessee walkers — sometimes called plantation walkers — are known for their calm dispositions. It was Magic’s Tennessee walker attitude that the vets were seeing. But they knew immediately something serious was in play with the personable animal, and examination revealed Magic was suffering from a potentially deadly condition of the connective tissue called laminitis. The laminitis started in the right front leg after his left front leg broke in a kick by another horse. To compensate for the injury, Magic shifted his massive weight off the broken leg and onto the healthy right leg. Under the strain, the tissue of the right leg inflamed, leading to laminitis. Untreated, the bone inside the hoof actually separates from the hoof wall and slips down through the bottom of the foot. Euthanasia often follows.
When Magic arrived in Auburn, only a sixteenth of an inch of tissue remained between the bone and hoof. In fact, the injury degenerated rapidly, and the bone slipped through the hoof soon after Magic’s arrival.
From the start, the vets realized, this was a battle for Magic’s life.
Every year some 3,200 horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs and even a few zebras, llamas, and alpacas visit the Large Animal Teaching Hospital at Auburn University. Part of the college of veterinary medicine, it’s the oldest institution of its kind in the nation. Service in the 71,500-square foot hospital, built in 2003 and named for a former dean, is part of a veterinary student’s final year of training
Most of the patients are horses — some 2,300 last year — and most of their ills are routine. They come for the abdominal pain that could be anything from impacted food to a twisted gut requiring surgery. The come with the chokes, an ailment that happens when the horse eats too fast, or doesn’t’ chew properly, leaving a wad of food blocking their digestion. Plenty arrive with aches and pains and open wounds.
But Magic’s case wasn’t run-of-the mill.
“He was unusual in that the bone that he broke is one typically we can’t fix,” said Munsterman. The break was in the radius, which is the leg bone closest to the horse’s chest. Breaking this large, weight-bearing bone is often catastrophic. In Magic, the fracture was just above the first joint, the knee.
“But he broke such a small piece of the radius bone we hoped it would heal on its own. It was a fist-size piece a very end of the radius,” she said. The danger was from the small fissures that radiated from the break. Propagation along any of those cracks would turn hopeful case perilous.
“If a radius breaks in half, it’s pretty much done,” Yorke said. An x-ray showed many fracture lines snaking out from the original injury, adding to the animal’s vulnerability. Little flesh covers the bone at this point on the body, and the kick opened a wound that wouldn’t heal. Plus, the wound was infected, and infection had entered the bone — another devastating turn of events.
“It’s a bad spot for horse to get kicked,” Yorke said.
For Magic’s owner, Gayle Lehman, Magic is more than a horse. Lehman grew up riding horses as a child in Brundidge, Ala., some 60 miles south of Montgomery. In 2001, Lehman decided it was time to ride again. She and her husband, Billy Jackson, drove to farm in Dothan, Ala., to look at horses. It was here that she met the two-year-old Magic.
“You have to take love into account when you call these young plantation walkers ‘beautiful,’” Lehman acknowledges. “ Magic was all head and legs. He was a gangly teenager. … but even then he was beautiful to me.”
Lehman took Magic for a ride around the property. When she returned, she didn’t have to tell her husband she was smitten. “The tears were flowing, I couldn’t get rid of the grin,” she said. “He said, ‘She’ll take him,’ and we brought him home.”
Billy was already sick when they bought Magic. Six months later Billy Jackson lost his battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Lehman was devastated by grief.
“You can’t sleep at night. Everything’s horrible. Nothing’s right. The world’s just scary as hell all of a sudden. And every night I was just back there with Magic crying, hanging on to him. I was on my knees, just couldn’t get a grip,” she said.
When she talks about those first nights with Magic after her husband’s death, she still cries. Every night she visited Magic in his stable. When she was weak from weeping and could no longer stand, she would cling to his mane and he would pull her to her feet again.
Now eight years later, married to Sam Lehman, it was her turn to pull Magic to his feet. Magic wasn’t living at home when he was injured. Lehman had been pasturing him at her sister’s place while she prepared a pasture for Magic at a new home. She arrived in Auburn three days after her horse. His condition astonished her.
“I was just dumbfounded,” she said. “That’s not my horse standing there. That’s not Magic. This horse was there with his head down. He wasn’t eating, he wasn’t drinking, his eyes were dull. I mean that was not my horse,” she said.
But her arrival had an immediate affect. “I put my arms around him and started talking to him and then his head came up. Just the knowledge that ‘She’s here!’ You could see it. The vets could see it.
“His face actually lights up when she comes to the stall with him,” Munsterman said.
Yorke agreed: “I’ve never seen a horse who clearly feels much better when his owner sits in the stall with him.”
But his case remained dangerous. Munsterman, Yorke, and Dr. Christina Hewes, a clinical instructor, decided that, in addition to administering antibiotics to quell the infection, they would suspend the big horse in sling attached to the roof of the stable. The sling would cradle his belly, limiting the weight on his injured legs and keeping him still.
Slings have been used for years in rescues, when a horse needs to be lifted from a disaster area by helicopter. But using them in the treatment of injury is fairly uncommon at smaller clinics.
“Usually only big surgical centers have them,” Yorke said. “The average vet wouldn’t have it.”
This is the point where many owners face heart-wrenching decisions. Long-term treatment as intensive as Magic’s is expensive. No amount of love is enough to save an animal when there isn’t enough money to pay for treatment.
Rhodes Bell, a fourth-year vet student from Lexington, Ky., said it’s a sad feature of animal medicine.
“If it’s something where this horse needs surgery or it’s going to die, I’ve seen a lot of cases where they’ll say, ‘We’ll go to surgery and see if it’s something simple that we can easily fix,’ and we’ll do that.” But if the case turns out to be complicated, many times, the owners will say, ‘“OK. Go ahead and just euthanize on the table.’ Or they’ll get to that point where they just can’t afford surgery and we’ll keep the horse as comfortable as possible for as long as possible,” Bell said
Munsterman shares Bell’s frustration, but says that the doctors and students at the hospital go to great lengths to work with what’s available.
“A lot of people can’t afford the things that their horses are going to need,” she said. “You cut as many corners as you can, and we bend over backwards trying to get at least something done for the horses, but at some point we physically can’t afford to get the horse better. That’s probably the most frustrating thing. Most of the time it’s put to sleep if we can’t get them better.”
Lucky for Magic, Lehman was willing and able to go to any length to save him. Lucky for everyone, Magic was clever enough to adapt to the treatment.
“He was terribly smart,” Munsterman said. “He learned how to use the sling as soon as we put him in it. A lot of horses don’t like it. It pushes on their belly and holds them up. It’s an unnatural thing for a horse to be hanging in the air and some horses won’t allow it.”
The mesh sling swoops under the horse’s belly, around his chest, and around his backend. The front and back sections keep him from coming out of the sling. But the belly support cradles him, allowing him to rest but preventing him from lying down. Lying down and getting back up puts dangerous pressure on the injured limbs. Once in the sling, the horse can take the weight off his legs to sleep.
“We put it on him, and he went to sleep. He figured it out in ten minutes,” Munsterman said.
“If you have to have a horse that’s going through what Magic’s going through, I’d hope for it to be Tennessee Walker,” Yorke said. “They’re tough horses, they’re smart horses, and they tolerate pain better. They get better when other horses don’t.”
Yorke owns a walker herself, a horse she rescued, but hers is stinker and will not abide a rider. She also still owns the chestnut quarter horse she rode as a girl in hunter-jumper competition. Wise Guy — that’s what she calls him — is twenty-six years old and lives in Virginia. “He’s a character, a very good show horse and a trouble maker. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known most people.” She also owns a thoroughbred — all of which puts a terrible strain on her budget of the veterinary surgical resident. Not that she could change things. “I was just one of those girls that seem to have it genetically” — “it” being this thing for horses. “I was drawing horses before I even saw a horse,” she said.
Keeping Magic calm during his long recovery proved a simple process.
“He had the radio playing — I think he preferred country,” Yorke said, acknowledging that country was really probably the preference of people working around him. “He had a variety of toys we tied to his front door that he could knock about, and he had a wheel with horse candy on it — a sugary sort of block.”
Hospital staff soon learned he was a trickster and would pull all kinds of stunts to earn human companionship, Munsterman said.
“He liked to play with the students. He would knock his water bucket over so they had to come in” and bring him more water. He liked to knock over his hay cart so students would have to spend more time with him.
“He was good at getting attention,” she said. Thirty-four year old Munsterman knows every horse has its own personality, something she encountered when she broke her first horse — a little red pony — when she was eleven. “It was a crazy thing. I was a young girl and she was a young horse. Usually it’s a dangerous combination.” She still has the pony, as well as two thoroughbreds and quarter-horse/draft horse mix. All three of the others are rescues. The Missouri native came to Auburn four years ago after completing a residency at Ohio State University. She lives in Notasulga with her husband Jack Kottwitz, who is veterinarian at the Montgomery Zoo. They met, you would never guess, in history class.
While she occasionally gets involved in zebra care at the zoo, her main focus is the animals at the veterinary hospital, including, for six months, Magic.
“Half the senior class worked on Magic. He just became a fixture,” Munsterman said. “He was remarkably well-behaved for a horse who couldn’t move for six month.”
Now, Magic is back home in Florida, and finishing a year of rehabilitation.
“He and I will be reading the beautiful trails in northwest Florida again,” Lehman wrote in an email. She’s grateful for the care he received.
“The students, they’re careful, they’re conscientious, they’re all incredible. They’re caring. They’re gentle with the animals and they are becoming vets because they do love the animals and it just shows.”
Without a doubt Magic owes his recovery to the folks at the Large Animal Hospital. But it didn’t hurt that he had a little Tennessee Walker magic all his own.
