How to Rehabilitate a Horse That Has Suffered Starvation

I stood stunned watching the mare back off the horse trailer. Her condition had me speechless while a well of fury began to bubble up inside of me. Being an Animal Cops addict I'd seen the starving, skinny horses they rescue and sometimes even have to euthanize. I'd rehabilitated horses on the thin side, often due to age. But until then, I'd never seen a horse in such pitiful condition as her.

At first glance one could mistake her for a young horse not fully matured. Her lack of muscle tone, with a pencil thin neck that looked far to skinny to possibly hold up her head fostered that image. Yet on a closer look one could see the signs of her age.

Although summer, her winter coat still clung to her, helping to disguise the thinness of her body. With a hands on inspection you could count each rib, each vertebrae. Her shoulder bones were sharply prominent. Sores had been rubbed into the skin over both hip bones that lacked any padding to cushion them when she lay down.

Never having dealt with a horse this skinny, her condition scared me. All I could remember were articles on horses that as they began to be reintroduced to food, would end up with their systems shutting down. The only advantage we seemed to having going for us is that while having been feed way too little to maintain her, she had at least been receiving a portion of food each day.

There is this sick sensation that grows in you as you begin to fully understand how badly a horse has been starved. She barely picked through a couple tiny mouthfuls of hay before she had to stop because her stomach had shrunk so much, it couldn't hold much in it any more.

Your first instinct is to get the richest, best food possible and just pour it to them. Yet to follow that instinct can lead to trouble.

So we had to curtail our need to just make it all better right then and there and take a slow approach to rebuild her weight. Small, frequent meals of Bermuda hay and timothy pellets slowly began building her weight. With food available more often and in larger quantities she slowly began to eat more at one time, and oh so slowly that painful thinness began to fade.

The change in her physically over time was astounding, but no less so was the change in her personality. Quiet, listless, and reserved when she arrived. She didn't acknowledge the other horses or us in any way.

Then one day I heard the oddest sound echoing through the barn. Puzzled I walked out of the tack room and checked on all the horses, yet everyone seemed fine. I walked back in the tack room only to hear the noise again. This time I identified it as coming from her stall.

While she enjoyed eating period, and liked her hay, she loved her pellets. She ignored her hay until the pellets were gone and only then would she dive in. If anyone else got more pellets, she was supposed to get them too. This day I'd been dishing up pellets and not gotten to her yet. As I watched she began rapidly flapping her lips together while nodding her head at me! From that day forward she flapped her lips when impatient or irritated over something, usually when she felt she wasn't being fed fast enough!

To turn a horse around in such bad condition and watch them blossom is such an incredible experience. Yet in that joy is a kernel of sadness that it was even necessary in the first place.