Have you ever heard of thrush? If you are a horse owner with some knowledge, you know what I am talking about. For those who don’t, thrush is a nasty infection that gets into the commissures of the hoof and produces a black, stinky ooze that looks like something that came out of a swamp. It’s not fatal, unless gone untreated and allowed to penetrate the inner strutures of the hoof, but it is hard to get rid of. Before I came to my mistress, there was a horse in the stall next to me who got it. Charley had to have his foot cleaned and treated twice a day for a week, then once a day for a couple of weeks after that. He told me it was very painful because they had let it go for too long, and the infection had invaded the soft tissue in his hoof.

Thank goodness I’ve never had it, neither has my buddy Ziggy. Maybe because we’re not kept stalled for hours on end and have a beautiful, clean pasture to roam in all day. How lucky is that?