Jenny blew another abscess today, this one in her right front. She had been walking slower for a few days & reluctant to move around much. Her feet are so bad she doesn't go 3 legged lame like a "normal" abscess & the thought didn't occur that she might have another one. Courtney is suppose to come out Friday to trim her & whoever needs it. I'm still dealing with the abscess in her re-sectioned rear hoof on a daily basis.
Gus right now is walking very good, so I don't know if she will trim him or not. He is such a balancing act, trim too much & he's ouchy, don't trim enough, he's ouchy. In order for him to be comfortable it has to be like the baby bear in Goldilocks...........JUST RIGHT..........!!!! He probably should be trimmed every week, once the length & heel height is figured out. so there isn't ever any real growth.
He's also over his skin infection. The scrapings showed 3 different bacterial infections, Staph, Strep, & Pseudomonas aeruginosa. I know what the 1st two are, have dealt with Staph on a personal basis years ago. I don't have a clue what the last one is, & couldn't pronounce it if my life depended on it. One of the tests called a sensitivity test, was to see what antibiotics work or don't work with the bacteria they find. That one is not sensitive to a whole list of the usual antibiotics Vets prescribe as the first line of defense, such as amoxicillin, tetracycline, & SMZ, which is what I'm giving Jenny for the abscess in her rear foot. Sure hope we aren't wasting time, if it's not just a plain old garden variety abscess. So Gus got Gentamicin & within 36 hours, no more gooey ickies, all dried up.
He's also over his skin infection. The scrapings showed 3 different bacterial infections, Staph, Strep, & Pseudomonas aeruginosa. I know what the 1st two are, have dealt with Staph on a personal basis years ago. I don't have a clue what the last one is, & couldn't pronounce it if my life depended on it. One of the tests called a sensitivity test, was to see what antibiotics work or don't work with the bacteria they find. That one is not sensitive to a whole list of the usual antibiotics Vets prescribe as the first line of defense, such as amoxicillin, tetracycline, & SMZ, which is what I'm giving Jenny for the abscess in her rear foot. Sure hope we aren't wasting time, if it's not just a plain old garden variety abscess. So Gus got Gentamicin & within 36 hours, no more gooey ickies, all dried up.
Old Pepper is Mr. Perky these days. In fact he's finally found a young lady he can smooze or at least he thinks he can. Twice we've seen him "kinda" up on Cheyenne's back. Of course Cheyenne is only 32 inches tall, so it's not a big transition, but it does look rather silly. I guess it works for him, keeps the old heart pumping, I'm sure..........!!!!! LOL
Everybody else seems to be doing good right now, although I wish it would get cold enough to kill off the flies & the mosquitoes. I don't think the mosquitoes bother the donkeys much because they have hide like a cow, rather than skin like a horse. But they use the water buckets to lay their eggs & we spend a lot of time & effort dumping buckets to get rid of the wigglers. And they do bite us if they get the chance......!!!!!
2 comments:
Tish ~ you don't have to dump the water buckets to get rid of the mosquito larvae! Water is too precious a commodity here and the dumped water makes a mess.
Get a pool skimmer net (the flat ones) and skim the suckers off the water. Can also scoop out other stuff like twigs, etc that get in the water.
If the pool skimmer is too large for your buckets, you can rig a smaller "net" out of some window screen and an embroidery hoop - or John probably has something in the shop which would work as well.
John has a fish net he uses to "fish" out stuff. But we usually dump the buckets if anything moves, some of them are so small I think they'd go thru the fish net. All the swimming larvae probably aren't mosquito, but they all get dumped. We use 5 gallon buckets in the summer so there isn't a lot of water waste.
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