Rafter B Quarter Horse Ranch

Rafter B Quarter Horse Ranch Rafter B Quarter Horses no longer exists in Texas. Thank you everyone but I’ve sold and retired.
(3)

Permanently closed.
EIA IN MOORE COUNTY TEXAS!! Friends that is up around Dumas. Too close to home. Please be very very careful and have you...
10/10/2024

EIA IN MOORE COUNTY TEXAS!! Friends that is up around Dumas. Too close to home. Please be very very careful and have your Coggins test done on every horse pony or donk (and mule) on your place. We have to get this stopped in its tracks. No cure and no vaccine for EIA.

04/05/2024

Searching for that perfect Welsh size pony that is so gentle it is almost dead but not lame. I’m going to be super picky so don’t be offended if I don’t pick your pony. This pony will be for my GG kids and needs to be BROKE AND SUPER GENTLE and like to be messed with. Let me know if you have someone. Great forever home💚💚💚

02/18/2023

I will not be a miserable cow today!!!

11/28/2022

NO LONGER IN BUSINESS. SOLD AND MOVED TO ARIZONA. NEW OWNERS ARE NOT GOING TO BOARD HORSE. THANK Y’ALL FOR EVERYTHING. ❤️❤️❤️

10/13/2022

Just to make things even more interesting during the AZ move my intelligent butt decided to roll
My huge iron metal wagon wheels closer to the loading area, lost control of the one I was rolling and…yep it landed square on top of my left foot. Broke the bone going to my second toe and fractured it enough need an orthopedic surgeon🙄🙄🙄. In a boot until I can get horses to Kingman tomorrow early morning. No walking, no driving. What a joke! Of course I have to load horses and saddled etc etc! Oh I wish I could have a do over and leave the damn wagon wheel!!! Grrrrrrrr

09/11/2022
08/29/2022

Rafter B Quarter Horse’s have sold the ranch. The new buyers will be interested in boarding but I don’t have a phone number for
Them yet. They will take over the ranch on Oct 7th and seem to
Be very knowledgeable and kind people. I will update with a phone number when I have one. Thanks to all of you over the many years. I loved everyone of your horses and you too!!

08/05/2022

Dr. Bo Brock. Lamesa TX

Navicular

Since I first became a veterinarian I have hated this disease in horses and my goal has always been to defeat it. It used to be called navicular disease and over the years the name has changed many times.

Whatever you want to call it....it is extremely common in the kind of horses that we practice on and has been the end of more athletic careers than anything else by far.

In 2012 a veterinarian in England named Ian Wright described a surgical approach to the bursa of the navicular bone and began carrying out surgical procedures in that area that had never been done before.

He works on mostly sport horses and we work on western horses. We wanted to see how well it worked in the horses that come to our practice.... and we were amazed at the good it did.

We have modified some of the surgery to adapt to the quarter horse and added some cyst drilling osteostixis to the procedure. This surgery is done through two very small incisions with the arthroscope, working inside the hoof. It is the most exciting thing I have done in my career.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk to veterinarians in California about the procedure and, in preparing for the talk I gathered some statistics on the effectiveness of the surgery that we have seen so far

Most of the horses we have done the procedure on are what we title as “end stage”. Which means no other treatment is working on them and they are effectively no longer able to be used for their intended purpose.

I used the first 100 cases we did the surgery on and found that 72 percent that had the lesions described by Dr. Wright were back to doing their athletic event. These numbers are in line with what Dr. Wright found in England.

The surgery is of course coupled with mechanically corrected shoeing and physical therapy post-op.

I have been a vet for 30 years and I have spent the entire course of those years trying to find a way to help these horses continue doing what makes them and their owners smile. It has been a blessing to still be so excited about being a vet after all these years. And this procedure, developed by the vets in Lamesa, Texas, has kept me motivated and feeling so lucky to get to practice veterinary medicine.

The use of MRI diagnostics on the equine foot has opened many doors on this front. We can see problems in this area that we never knew existed just a few years back. Now we can identify them and as time goes by, we are developing ways to correct the problems. Veterinary medicine is at the forefront of the mechanics of motion and we are making strides that I never dreamed of thirty years ago.

07/23/2022

Boots and bandages - are we harming our horses as we try to protect them?

Bandaging and booting our horses is becoming more and more popular, especially with the popularity of matchy matchy sets. But are we doing more harm than good? Most people will have come across the articles in magazines and comments from vets saying they are, and yet still they become more and more popular. Why is that? Why do riders still cover their horses in thick fleece bandages or fluffy boots despite the dangers? Tradition I suppose. Wanting to fit in. Or just habit, some will feel like they haven’t finished tacking up if they haven’t put the boots on.

I know this isn’t about dentistry (for which I apologise) but I am a vet first and foremost, and as a dressage rider I am asked why I don’t use bandages all the time. I’ve written about this several times now and no one pays attention, so rather than stating facts and quoting research, I’d like to take you through my journey of discovery, please bear with me. Facts and papers are at the end.

Rewind 12 years and I was in my final year at vet school. Prior to and during vet school I had a horse and we did dressage. I had planned to ODE but this horse pulled every tendon and ligament known to vet kind. He spent more time out of work than in. Each time I would up my game with the latest boots/bandages on the market. From fluffy boots to wraps to sports fetlock boots, fleece bandages to gamgee and cotton to the half fleece/half elastic bandages. I learnt new techniques for better support, figure of 8 bandaging to cradle the fetlock etc etc. I’d been there and done it. My collection was extensive.

Right at the end of vet school I had my rotations. I chose Equine lameness as one of my options. During in this I very vividly remember a wet lab with Dr Renate Weller where she had a skinned horses leg (showing all of the tendons and ligaments) in a machine that mimicked the pressures a horse applies to their limbs. She took us through walk, trot, canter and gallop, loading this leg so we could see the inside workings of the horses leg without the skin. It was fascinating I can tell you, and I very clearly remember thinking about my horse and wondering how on earth we are suppose to support this limb when it undergoes these incredible forces! Half a ton of animal pushing down a tiny spindle of a leg held by tendons barely thicker than my thumb. Craziness!

Fast forward just a few short months and I was a fully qualified vet in the big wide world. I attended my first BEVA Congress and during the break I wandered around the stalls looking at the latest inventions and technologies companies bring to these gatherings. Here I came across a company with the Equestride Boot which caught my eye. Now if you haven’t seen this boot, it’s wonderful and I’ve since used it a few times in rehabbing very severe tendon and ligament injuries with great success. The boot is a carbon fibre boot that stops the fetlock dropping, which stops the tendons and ligaments being fully loaded while they heal. This boot is super strong. You couldn’t ride a horse in it as it is limiting the range of motion so much, but they can move about easily enough at the lower settings to rehab etc. The guy on the stand (I’m afraid I can’t remember his name) showed me their research and in the straight talking Irish way explained the stupidity of expecting a thin piece of material to support a horse. And of course it can’t! Literally no bandage or boot (short of this very expensive carbon fibre rehab boot) is capable of reducing the amount the fetlock drops. Thinking back to Dr Weller’s demonstration, I could very clearly see how ridiculous I had been to ever believe a scrap of material could do anything to reduce or support that pressure.

But the boots/bandages don’t actually cause any harm do they? Surely it’s ok to use them on the off chance they might help and if we look good in the meantime, great! Well, not long after this, research started appearing that got me very worried about my bandage collection. Heat. Anyone that uses bandages and boots will not be surprised to see sweat marks under their bandages/boots after they’ve been removed. They trap a lot of heat. The horses body and legs generate a lot of heat when working. The tendons/ligaments in the leg, along with an increased blood flow generate ALOT of heat. Fleece bandages/boots in particular, hold this heat in the horses leg. Very few boots and virtually no bandages (especially if you use a pad under) allow the legs to breath adequately. This heat is easily enough to kill tendon/ligament cells. Each tendon/ligament is made of thousands and thousands of cells all lined up end on end and side by side in long thin spindles. They stretch and return to their original shape and size like an elastic band, absorbing and redistributing the pressures applied from further up the leg and from the ground impact below. All of these cells must work together as one to do this effectively.

Just a little side step here to explain how tendons/ligaments heal. A tendon/ligament cell can not be replaced like for like. They always heal with scar tissue. This is why reinjury is so much more likely if a tendon/ligament is blown. The fibrous scar tissue doesn’t stretch, it isn’t capable of stretching or absorbing the impact of a horses movement. It will always be a weak spot. In a full blown sprain/strain the whole (or most) of the tendon has been damaged. But this heat injury might just kill a few cells at a time. Those few cells are replaced by fibrous scar tissue, then next time a few more etc etc. Like a rubber band degrading over time the tendon/ligament loses its elasticity and eventually goes snap. Then you’ve fully blown a tendon/ligament. The injury didn’t start to happen at that moment, but that was the final straw. The damage adds up over time, each time thermal necrosis (vet word for cell death) occurs.

So if using boots/bandages can not offer any sort of support, and using them generates heat that slowly damages the tendons/ligaments until they give way. Why use them? Protection. This is the only reason to use boots. To stop the horse brushing, injuring themselves catching a pole or over cross country. But for goodness sake make sure your boots are breathable! If the horse is sweaty under the boot but not above or below, the boot is not breathable enough. And don’t use fleece bandages just because you like the colour. These fleece bandages are the worst at holding heat in the leg, way above the threshold for thermal necrosis to the cells of the tendons and ligaments. If your horse doesn’t need protection, don’t use boots. I haven’t for the last 12 years and *touch wood* I haven’t had a single tendon/ligament injury in any of my horses. I will never go back to boots or especially bandages now. I don’t use them for schooling, lunging, jumping, travelling, turnout, stable, in fact I don’t use them at all. Ever. But I don’t hunt or XC.

I hope you have found my story useful and can make informed decisions on boots and bandaging going forward.

For more information on the Equestride boot and their research into support offered by boots and bandages, visit http://www.equestride.com/ and https://www.equinetendon.com/services/equestride/

The horses leg under the compression machine at the Irish Equine rehabilitation and fitness centre https://fb.watch/cmVMt6-iOJ/ (I highly recommend you watch this incredible video. It clearly shows the amount of force the leg goes through and demonstrates the real purpose of boots)

Other relevant papers-
https://equimanagement.com/.amp/articles/horse-skin-temperature-under-boots-after-exercise
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8f15/0ea480edca142260d01f419f80d2e7e7fb29.pdf
http://www.asbweb.org/conferences/1990s/1998/59/index.html

Edit 1 - I am getting asked about stable wraps very frequently. This post is about riding, the tendons and blood flow create heat which is trapped by bandages/boots during exercise. This doesn’t occur in the stable stood still. If the horse has a strain/sprain resulting in inflammation, then there is an increase in blood flow and there is heat being created. In this situation you should not be bandaging. But if it’s cold and an old horse needs stable wraps to keep the joints warm and improve sluggish blood flow (filled legs) you can use the heat trapping to your advantage. But you need to be careful in summer.

Edit 2 - the other thing I’m being asked about is compression. Compression DOES NOT control inflammation. The inflammation still occurs, but the swelling can not escape the bandages and the increase in internal pressure reduces blood flow, causing ischemic damage. Like laminitis within the hoof. The hoof capsule prevents swelling so the inflammation expands inwards and cuts off the blood supply. This is why laminitis is so painful and difficult to treat. Compression is only useful in the case of leaky vessels, for example reduced blood pressure, reduced movement so the blood isn’t being pumped backup the legs, or osmotic imbalances eg low protein with diarrhoea. In these situations, compression of the legs can encourage blood to return to the vessels and continue circulating.

04/20/2022

"The Horse: here is nobility without conceit, friendship without envy, beauty without vanity, a wiling servant yet never a slave." – Ronald Duncan.

04/14/2022

At first, you might notice something wrong with your horse’s skin. He may start making unusual noises or being hypersensitive to your touch in the flank area – signs that would normally point to a medical issue such as a dermatological condition.

04/02/2022

Has your horse suffered a head trauma?

Do you know that a head trauma can lead to chronic head shaking? Unfortunately, most head traumas in horses go unnoticed unless the skin was broken. Even then, most horses just get stitched back up with no X-rays and no further exploration.

The horse industry does not recognize the importance of head injuries, nor do they relate to the pressure that we put on their heads and the problems that this causes. This is not to say that every horse who has a head trauma will become a head shaker, but in my experience, every head shaker has had a head trauma to one of the areas mentioned. Why some horses react and others don't is unknown. It is most likely a variety of factors involved.

Most craniosacral therapists who treat head shaking horses find some kind of compression from an old trauma around their sinus bones, or the TMJ (temporomandibular joint). Compressions on either the TMJ or one of the sinus bones will put pressure on either the trigeminal nerve or the ethmoid nerve, causing pain and burning sensations.

When allergy season is at its peak, sinus tissues expand to protect airways. If the bones surrounding the sinus cavity are injured or compressed, there is no room inside the sinus cavity to allow for expansion.Therefore the tissues and nerves become pinched, or compressed, resulting in the horse feeling a burning sensation in their nose.

As a result a horse will start to shake its head. The severity of the problem can range from the occasional head twitch or flick when ridden to violent headshaking, rubbing the face on the leg or ground and refusing to go forward. The symptoms are often worse when the horse is being ridden.

To not let things escalate to the above degree, treat every head injury with seriousness it deserves. If you know your horse suffered a head trauma do the x-ray scans or if you noticed weird new head tossing that was not there before keep in mind your horse might have had a head trauma that happened off your radar.

Craniosacral therapy can help this condition a great deal to the point of the symptoms disappearing completely. I have personally helped a great number of horses with this condition to the point where they were competing (again) or simply living a normal life again.

03/09/2022
02/17/2022
02/10/2022

Do you really understand how big your horse's lungs are? This picture is a horse's lungs fully inflated...amazing when you think they are enclosed in a horse's body! Did you know a horse takes in 2x 5-Gallon buckets of air ever second? Think of how much that really is. So, do the best you can to help your horse breathe!

02/01/2022
Equus giganteus the largest horse to ever live. 2.25 metres tall or 7.5 ft and between 1200–1500 kg in weight or 2600- 3...
01/04/2022

Equus giganteus the largest horse to ever live. 2.25 metres tall or 7.5 ft and between 1200–1500 kg in weight or 2600- 3300 lb in comparison the largest horse breed the Shire is between 850 to 1100 kg (1870 to 2430 lb) for stallions and 1.78 metres tall. Went extinct only 12,000 years ago and lived in what is now North America. Predators of this immense horse included the American lion, Smilodon, Dire wolves and the Short faced bear. Art by sameerprehistorica

01/04/2022

From Conrad Photography. I couldn’t have said it any better. God love all of us “old horse” owners.

I see you out there, and I love you for every sacrifice you have made.
I've mentioned it before--I adore shooting elderly horses. Not so much for the actual horse--i love the grumpy dudes and dudettes who are stingey with their ears, of course--but my absolute adoration comes from the people behind every single grey hair. Every single dropped back. Every single ridge in a carefully managed foot.
I see you, old horse owners. I see the promise you made your old friend--that he'd never leave your side again, that he'd never have to worry about a next owner. That he'd never load on a trailer bound for the unknown.
I see the expense it takes in dollars and worry. The careful diet you obsess over, the careful turnout buddies and just the right pasture with the perfectly not-too-big rolling pit.
I see you beaming at your old horse--proud and happy they are still proud and happy, despite not having sat on their backs for sometimes decades.
I see you-sometimes barely scraping by with two horses, sometimes barely scraping by with one. I see what you've done--the bills you've paid month after month because your old friend is still happy to live.
I see the joy your old friend brings you when he tilts his head just this way, and the way he stands just inches from your hair-both of you breathing one another in.
I see your impending heartbreak for the day you may have to make that final decision. I see your internal struggle--is he happy? Is he ok? Am I keeping him around for him or me?
I see your tears thinking about that day, and the tears of joy reliving his youth.
To everyone with an old horse, I see you, and I respect and love you. 💕

ATTENTION: SCAMMERS ARE TRYING TO GET IN ON THIS. NO ONE EXCEPT MABELLE BROWNING WILL HAVE TICKETS!! NO ONE!!!! DONT BUY...
01/01/2022

ATTENTION: SCAMMERS ARE TRYING TO GET IN ON THIS. NO ONE EXCEPT MABELLE BROWNING WILL HAVE TICKETS!! NO ONE!!!! DONT BUY FROM ANYONE ELSE!!! Ughhhh

Mabelle Browning has made this beautiful quilt to help fund dental surgery on the Grey gelding I rescued in Oct 2021. He is doing well and now needs the surgery.

From Mabelle Browning :
90x100 Jean with grey fleece back quilt tickets go on sale tomorrow. $5 each or 5 for $20. All proceeds go to major dental surgery for a horse. Will pull winner either April 1 or May 1 depending when funds are raised. First 10 tickets already sold. I have pay pal or cash app if you want to do over the phone tickets.

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Amarillo, TX

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