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Thursday, July 2, 2020
Excessive sex hormones are very common in mares, affecting their morale as much as their physique. This can lead to mood swings, colic and muscle tension in the neck, back and lumbar region. At such times, owners often feel that their mare no longer listens to them. Sometimes, added to this, work-induced stress or intense emotion can be enough to trigger a blood attack.
Discover in this article the case of a fickle mare and solutions to relieve her of her tensions.
The following article was written by Dr. Eva Jonville, a veterinarian. To better understand its meaning, she explains in the paragraph below the course of her consultations:
"Acupuncture is part of my primary approach and plays a central role in my consultations. These are based on Traditional Chinese Medicine. Then I use osteopathy or manual medicine, in a synergistic and complementary way. This is useful for removing musculoskeletal structural fixations when necessary.
Finally, depending on the disorders encountered, after an induction session with acupuncture needles, I can propose the implementation of a treatment with Chinese pharmacopoeia. This allows the effects of the needles to be prolonged over time, thus avoiding frequent consultations.
The diagnosis is carried out and refined according to 3 grids of readings:
The joint use of all these techniques potentiates each other for maximum results. The aim is to offer horses an integrative medicine ensuring a complete, complementary and coherent follow-up.
That said, there is no standard consultation. Each horse guides me towards its needs, to which I limit myself so as not to break the balance or the dynamics in place. It is a question of being succinct and precise in the choice of information given to the organism and the techniques used.
This means that the choice of treatment method is based on a precise individualized diagnosis and in-depth knowledge of therapeutic techniques. All of this is crowned by a continually nourished and enriched experience."
Luna is a nervous and muscular 5 year old Iberian mare. She is complicated, especially in the spring when she comes into heat and in the autumn when her ovarian cycles continue. At these times, she hates to be touched. When mounted, she sticks to the leg, flicks her tail, resists lowering her hips. Since she is usually flexible, when she resists like this, the owner persists in her demands. She thinks it's just a matter of getting her to yield by overcoming her excessive mare behaviour.
The aftermath of these sessions is hard: the mare engages less well, lacks strength in the hindquarters, resists, gets angry... This is when the vicious circle begins.
Since the end of the spring confinement, these problems have become more pronounced, and the owner is even afraid of bloodshed, as Luna had already experienced when she returned from a holiday two years ago. Her mare is getting stiffer and stiffer despite working. This makes her disorientated and she is afraid to let her rest for fear of bloodshed when she returns.
Luna is a hormonal mare, her ovaries are over-stimulated by hypothalamic-pituitary hormones, particularly GnRH, which causesmood swings and muscle tension. In Chinese medicine, this is explained by a hepatic overload (the liver metabolises sex and steroid hormones in excess, especially in spring) resulting in poor oxygenation of the muscles.
In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver "moves the blood". When the energy of the liver is blocked, this function is no longer assured: the excess energy goes to the head, the horse sees red, becomes angry, and the muscles no longer breathe. They then produce lactic acid which accumulates, generating muscular pains such as aches and pains, tensions appear, in particular in the psoas, very powerful and extremely solicited muscles and in the lumbar region due to the over-stimulation of the ovaries. Contractures which make the muscular oxygenation less and less efficient self-amplify this pain... until the blood stroke or the "ovarian" colic.
Diagram: the female sex hormone cycle in the follicular growth phase, before ovulation, when the mare's susceptibility is at its highest. Steroid hormones are catabolized into metabolites in the liver.These degradation products are then excreted in the urine.An excess of steroid hormones can saturate the liver and kidneys.
Once again,acupuncture is of great use to regulate the hormonal sphere and ovarian activity, as well as pharmacopoeia to drain the liver and muscles.
When it comes to working with mares, it's very important toavoid "conflictual" situations in which the mare stresses, resists, contracts and defends herself. That's why you need to be patient and "psychological", so that the mare can join forces with her rider and carry out what is expected of her with serenity, if not complicity. The rider must remain calm and reassuring, even if determined. To help muscles recover through breathing, it's very important to walk for a long time after work sessions. This will drain lactic acid, if it has been formed in excess during a stressful period.
Knowing how to spot the warning signs of the beginnings of heat, moments when mares are particularly tense, sensitive, delicate and reactive is important; these are critical moments during which the rider must show more patience and benevolence than exigency.
In the case of an ovarian mare, the Seaver technology can detect stress or discomfort by measuring the heart rate and thus alert the rider to any abnormal readings. The heart rate of a horse at rest is 30 to 45 beats per minute. When working, it can reach up to 240 beats per minute. Of course, these figures may vary slightly depending on your horse and the discipline you practice.
However, when a cardiac spike is observed during a session, it may indicate pain or discomfort in the horse that needs to be analyzed afterwards. "Did this cardiac spike occur during a request to start trotting or galloping?"Did this cardiac spike occur during arequest to lower the hips at a specific time during the session? "It is necessary to correlate the occurrence of cardiac peaks with the work done in order to identify the key moments when the discomfort occurred so as toadapt one's work and these requests afterwards.
We hope you enjoyed this article,
See you soon for a next article,
Dr. Eva Jonville
