Ep. 44 - Dr. Jared Sharp, DVM, of Idaho Equine Hospital
A practicing veterinarian from the Idaho Equine Hospital in Nampa, Idaho, Dr. Jared Sharp joins us to chat all things horse myths as submitted by the fans. After being raised on a Christmas Tree farm in western Oregon, he went on to be a collegiate rodeo contestant while attending veterinary school. He’s gone to school or worked in Oregon, Texas, New Mexico and now Idaho but completed his four-years of veterinary school at Oregon State University.
A rodeo competitor from youth levels through college, we chat team roping, competing, and the benefits of rodeoing while furthering your education in college.
Backstory
After spending a year at the Idaho Equine Hospital to do a year long rotating clinical, he moved to Texas for a couple years with his now-wife Whitley where he worked for a clinical animal imaging center in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. When they got the opportunity to move back to Idaho to work at the Idaho Equine Hospital, they couldn’t pass it up.
Moving Out of State For College
“I think for myself personally, traveling around was a great experience for me,” says Dr. Sharp. Originally he had his eyes set on Texas Tech but he realized the gravity of moving his horses from Texas and being able to rope calves would be hard. Choosing a community college with dorms, practice pens and practice cattles was more appealing.
It was a great learning experience but he recommends to not have your eyes set on one specific place; be flexible. Rodeo was the goal and veterinary school wasn’t on the radar until his second year of under grad.
Extracurricular Activities
During veterinary school at Oregon State there was an active chapter of the collegiate section of American Association Equine Practitioners and Jared was actually the president of that group which provided him with a lot of opportunities.
Fan Myths
Myth #1: You can’t give geldings Ace.
“That’s borderline fact and fiction,” says Dr. Sharp. The myth derives from Ace can cause a prolapse of the male genitially disabling it from retracting into the sheath. This can be detrimental to breeding stallions and may cause for the genitially to be amputated which would be devastating for a breeding stallion. If it happens to your gelding it’s not that big of a deal.
“I think that people used the rule of the stud and applied to the gelding inaccurately,” he adds. With a one in one-thousand chance risk of this happening, he said that he wouldn’t be as concerned with it as much as for the stud.
Myth #2: White footed horses are more prone to abscesses or other lamenesses.
“I definitely believe fiction,” says Dr. Sharp who shares that their has been a lot of research into seeing if their is a difference. “I think that the myth comes from that it’s a lot easier to see abrasions, etc., are easier to see in a white-footed horse.”
Myth #3: Horse inhalers are ineffective.
Fiction! They can be quite effective and there is rumor of a more cost-effective inhaler coming through. Nebulators have also become really popular in the performance horse world. Inhalers are also a way to give a horse medication that it needs when you need to target directly to the lungs.
Myth #4: An abcess is a “rock that migrates up through the hoof.”
It’s a myth but it comes from when a horse gets a gravel that works a rock that blows a small piece of gravel out of the coronary band which can make a traumatic injury for a barefoot horse. The process of it moving up the hoof wall and opening at the coronary band is called “gravel.”
Myth #5: Soundness has nothing to do with the horses body, it only has to do with the legs and hooves.
“It’s fiction in a sense, but the whole horse is very important - all things are a part of soundness.”
Myth #6: You have to feed a horse every day at the same time otherwise it’ll colic.
“It’s a great thought … something I was always taught as a kid as well… access to water all the time is what keeps them from colicing or can make them colic if they don’t have access to free-choice, clean, non-frozen water,” says Dr. Sharp.
Veterinarian’s Myth Choice: Inject a horse once and you have to keep re-injecting it.
You are going to have to re-inject your horse not because we did it today but because it has arthritis or inflammation in that joint. If we got to the point that your horse needed injection to ease that inflammation, it’s probably going to get back to this point because of their job or their age.
What are injections?
Injections vary a ton on what you are going to inject into your horse. The baseline, simple thing, is that horses get inflammation in the joint that causes pain, poor performance, etc. which is treated much like a human would be with a joint lubrication of some sort. It can get more aggressive depending on what you know about the animal; such as a meniscus tear, a ligament issue. Those will be treated with regenerative therapy which is plasma pulled from the blood of that horse that you inject back into the joint for natural anti-inflammatory properties and growth factors. It will eliminate the inflammation and set up the body for natural healing.
There are a lot of products out and, in research, due to the myth of continuous injections. If your horse is requiring repetitive doses of steroid, it’s definitely time to change to regenerative therapy.
“I think that eventually we will see a change in the equine industry to be more focused on regenerative therapy,” says Dr. Sharp.
Neck & SI Joint Injections - thoughts on that?
“Probably one of the more technically challenging injections,” says Dr. Sharp because these injections are done via MRI. You can use physical landmarks in a lot of other joints to “blindly inject” or not watch the needle inject on a camera. “I think they are very effective in a horse that needs them.”
Neck arthritis can cause, most often times, a shortened forward phase of the stride. For example, if you are circling to the left, they’ll be short on the right front because they won’t want to reach out on that circle. A lower leg injury that would be shorter on the inside of the circle. This goes back to the full body issue of where lamenesses occur.
Fad Lamenesses
For a period of time, it seemed that everyone was saying a horse with a head bob or lameness had navicular - what is the current fad lamenesses? Dr. Sharp explained that the navicular fad came at a time when we were all of a sudden able to diagnose better where we were numbing feed and taking radiographs of the feet. A lot of horses were characterized as navicular and, the equivalent now, is something called kissing spine.
While clinically significant, the reason it is a fad is because of the mobile imaging systems we can take are becoming higher quality. It used to be an overhead x-ray generator at a university that they weren’t able to do all of the time and look as indepthly at the back of the animal.
The fad goes along with the ability to look closer at an animal, especially, say, in a pre-purchase setting. A correlation between radiographic findings versus clinical pain. If you send the same radiograph to a multitude of veterinarians of a hock, you’ll get the same answer where you’d get varied opinions if they were on the back.
“We don’t have enough cases under our belt, to figure out which one means that they are going to be back sore. Sometimes I have horses with terrible back radiographs and they don’t show a sign and then horses with nothing wrong that have a soreness. Clearly we have a lot more to learn,” says Dr. Sharp.
Bleeding in Barrel Horses
A “bleeder” is exercised induced pulmonary hemorrhage. A lot of people believe their horse has never bled but it’ll ultimately take a scope down the horses into their airway to confirm if they have bled or not. If you see obvious blood from the nostrils after extreme exercise, then it is. If it goes undiagnosed, it can be a problem.
Additional medications or new research for bleeders hasn’t grown much in recent history. What has changed is how we manage bleeders besides tried and true lasik are ways to improve the percentage of bleeders but ultimately there's a lot of room there to find additional medications.
Road Plans
Have a vaccination plan before you are heading out on the road for all of your horses. If you have your veterinarian do the vaccinations, there is a little bit of an “insurance,” if you’ll call it because they’ll be able to cover some of the costs incurred if your horse shows signs or is diagnosed with the virus it is vaccinated for.
During the summer, we will even do routine bloodwork to check on our horses to make sure that nothing is sneaking up that we don’t see coming. Allowing horses to eat off the ground when they can and to relax outside of the trailer are all important aspects.
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