‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised sole.
According to Horse Scene, a bruised sole can happen as quickly as stepping on a stone. (I imagine that a bruised soul can happen just as easily, but that is where my knowledge of the matter begins and ends, because there are no magazines on the shelves of Farrants newsagents in Cobham with articles on bruised souls, so far as I can see, which is a shame.)
Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, has a bruised sole precisely because she stepped on a stone. She felt a bit funny when I was riding her, and then when I turned her out in her field afterwards she didn’t look right at all. When I came back a few hours later to check on her, she was standing still, not eating, her head drooping to the ground.
She could barely walk. I had to pull her back to the yard. In a panic, I rang my friend Lieve, who knows everything about horses: ‘I’ve broken my pony,’ I said, close to tears. I always regress to a three-year-old when my horses are not well.
‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t broken her. I’m on my way.’ Lieve is my fourth emergency service. She is like the AA, only for things with four legs, not four wheels.
Every horse-owner needs a Lieve because you cannot just call the vet any more. The vet will order X-rays, thermal imaging, biopsies, blood tests and psychiatric assessments as soon as look at a horse.
I once called the vet to a horse with a runny nose and within seconds she had got a probe inside its nasal cavities. Naturally, she found some bacteria or other, requiring expensive antibiotics and a £350 bill. But if you put a tube into anything and looked hard enough you would find things that shouldn’t be there. The animal probably just had hay-fever. Now when my horses sneeze I tell them to shut up — ‘Shut up, for the love of god!’ I wail, understandably.
My vet explained to me recently that this mania for testing is nothing to do with veterinary greed and everything to do with the compensation culture. Apparently, if a vet makes the slightest mistake now, they get sued by the Wayne and Waynetta Slobs of the horse-owning world.
Some horse-owners are getting so litigious that we are not very far off riders suing other riders for whiplash if they come up behind them too quickly in trot.
All veterinary medicine, therefore, starts at the worst case scenario and works backwards. If I had called the vet for advice about Grace’s limping, they would have ordered an immediate horse ambulance to take her to equine A&E and I would have had to re-mortgage my house to fund high-tech diagnostic tests for spinal injury. Then, three days later, they would have informed me that she had, in fact, trodden on a pebble.
As it was, we poked and prodded Gracie all over until we found the bruise on her back foot, then dosed her up with Arnica tablets and something called ‘No Bute Bute’ — a herbal alternative to phenylbutazone, the horse painkiller commonly found in all good burgers. And we put her to rest in a small paddock with her adoptive sister Darcy, the thoroughbred yearling, whom she loves above all things and who always cheers her up.
Her hoof is now bright purple and she is doing much better already. I am not doing much better. Now that I can’t ride, I’m even more restless, listless and dejected. There is no doubt about it. The bruised sole has made the bruised soul a lot worse. Unable to distract myself by riding, I am racked by that gnawing, low-level anxiety that tells you something is wrong, but won’t reveal exactly what.
The advice of Horse Scene is quite apposite: ‘If you are suffering more than the occasional bruised sole, then you need to ask why this is happening and if anything long term can be done to help.’
I suspect that something long term might be done to help. It probably has to do with cultivating a stronger faith in the essential goodness of the universe. But I need a quicker fix than that.
There’s only one thing for it. While Gracie is resting her bruised sole, I’m taking my bruised soul to India. If the spiritual atmosphere of the most beautiful country on earth doesn’t help, the spa at the Oberoi in Jaipur should do something.
Comments