May: Belle – Show Season Prep

Belle: Prepping for Show Season!

Belle is Dr. McDonald’s 13 year-old Canadian Warmblood mare. She is a show jumper, aiming to campaign the 1.0m to 1.10m classes this coming show season. Like many hard-working horses, Belle has accumulated some wear-and-tear arthritis and previous soft tissue injuries through her career and travels up to this point. Keeping Belle feeling and jumping her best is a year-round endeavour, but the biggest effort happens in the spring to get her geared up for the up-coming season. Belle has arthritis in both of her fore coffin joints and both of her hocks.

While Dr. Kaitlin is aware of Belle’s soundness issues, both from her history and how she feels to ride, every spring Belle undergoes a pre-season soundness evaluation. This evaluation includes watching her move on the lunge line on both hard and soft footing, as well as performing flexion tests to more specifically evaluate her joint comfort. As you can see in the videos, Belle shows a marked positive response (painful) to her left hind upper limb flexion (which stresses her hock and stifle joints primarily), as well as a lesser degree positive response to her right hind upper limb flexion. Belle is also mildly positive to the flexion of her lower forelimbs, a sign that her coffin joint arthritis is causing her some discomfort.

To improve Belle’s comfort going into show season, Dr. Kaitlin injects her hocks and coffin joints with steroids and hyaluronic acid, which in combination reduce the inflammation and provide healthy lubrication for her arthritic joints.

Belle is also maintained on Legend – an intravenous form of hyaluronic acid given monthly to provide systemic support for any joints that may become inflamed from her higher intensity workload through the show season.

In addition to these medications, Dr. Kaitlin also regularly performs veterinary spinal manipulation therapy on Belle and will be adjusting her both before and after her horse shows this summer. Spinal manipulation therapy helps keep Belle moving symmetrically and helps Dr. Kaitlin notice and address problem areas prior to them becoming significant issues.

Belle definitely keeps Dr. Kaitlin busy, and if you ask her, it’s definitely worth it!