Teri Allen - 5 Horses - Stringhalt - Stifle - Mystery
Lameness - Navicular - HOT Mare - Kissing Spine
John Dowdy:
Hello and welcome to this week's Equinety podcast. I am really excited as I am every week to have on our next guest, Teri Allen out of Elizabeth, Colorado. Teri, welcome to the Equinety podcast.
Teri Allen:
Thank you. Thanks for having us and letting us talk about the product and having us here this morning.
John Dowdy:
Well, we're glad to have you. And I know you've got a plate full, you've got a farm with around 55 horses. You've got a boarding facility, you've got your Terolyn Horse Rescue. And let's just jump right into this. Tell us a little bit about your rescue project because we've got four different horses we're going to talk about.
And I know that you've got a lot of other stories, but we kind of zeroed in on these because we're going to be talking about one that you initially purchased the product for which had some stringhalt, stifle issues. Then three rescue horses that were kind of pre-navicular and another one which I'm excited to talk about on this call.
Because I don't believe we've had any other person on the podcast talk about one with kissing spine, so that'll be very interesting and helpful for a lot of folks. But let's back it up a little bit and tell us about your Terolyn Horse Rescue and how that project all got started and how that's going.
Terolyn Horse Rescue
Teri Allen:
Oh. So I have been a horse trainer for many years. I've been at my current location for almost 20 years and along the way with training, I've occasionally taken a horse or two that were rescues that I would do some training on and then I would re-home.
This became a real big project to me and very dear to me when I was asked to help with Morgan Safenet on going to an auction to save a Morgan horse, which is what I used to train, up in Fort Collins at one of the livestock auctions.
And when I went there, seeing these horses in such horrible conditions, so stressed out, these horses were run behind the livestock, they weren't ridden through these sales. They were sold by the pound, they were just run over the scales, run into a very tiny arena ... very stressed out animals.
And that's where I knew I had to step in and do more. We did end up saving the Morgan, but I'd say saving that horse is what started me on this path with the rescue. So that's been almost four and a half years ago and I became an official 501(c)3 four years ago.
So we just try and get horses out at the slaughter pipeline. We try and get them ... before they go to auction, before they're in such stressed out conditions, we try and rehab them and then find them good homes. And it's always hard, it's never an easy thing, but really it's so important to me.
It makes everybody feel so good when they know they can help in some way. We know we can't save them all, but the ones who can help, we're just so proud to have been able to do that for them.
John Dowdy:
Sure. Now tell me about the rescue and the Annie's project and with the dude ranch horses.
Teri Allen:
So we have partnered with another rescue here in Colorado, actually they're in Elizabeth, and it's Drifter's Hearts of Hope. And we were asked to partner with the Annie project, which is we take in retired dude ranch horses. There was just an abundance of ranch horses, guests horses that were going through these livestock auctions.
And so Jackie from Drifter's decided that maybe it was a good idea to talk to them and try to intercept these horses prior to them going to these auctions which is really incredibly cool to be able to keep these animals out of a spotter pipeline just because once they're through an auction and they don't even necessarily have to end up in the kill pen, they're just stressed out.
These animals go through a post traumatic stress and it sometimes takes weeks or months to get them to start coming around. So this project is very cool because they're coming from maybe a hardworking situation, but they're not put through the stresses of the other part. But when we do take these horses in, what we've noticed is they've been used hard.
The ones that we've gotten in, all of them have sore, tense muscles, they've all definitely had feet issues. If you could imagine with them having to go up these mountains, these Rocky mountains here, they have to have these incredibly thick heavy shoes on. And most of these dude ranches ask that they are going up the mountain three times a day.
So by the time they're retired, we're trying to get them back into overall health. Our goal is to be able to do that, get them feeling better and then find them very light riding homes that they can retire in.
John Dowdy:
Sure. Wow. Well, that's a pretty amazing project you've got going. And like you said, can't save them all, but the ones that you are able to are able to live long, healthy lives so that's very commendable for sure. So when we get into ... you've been in the horse business now, what, 19 years? So when you started your boarding facilities.
So you definitely know horses, understand horses and of course you've dealt with a lot of different issues. And let's get into talking about the first one, Lacey. What was going on with Lacey? She's a 12 year old Morgan. Tell us a little bit about Lacey, what you were dealing with up until you found the Equinety product. What were you dealing with there?
Lacey: A Morgan Suffering From Stringhalt & Mystery Lameness
Teri Allen:
Well, so Lacey is just a very sweet Morgan. It ended up, I used to train her and she was my horse and then my daughter started riding her and kind of claimed ownership of her. But she presented one morning of just very lame in her hind end. At first, maybe it looked like it was just kind of her hooves.
We do have a lot of issues around here with thrush if there's rain or we've had any kind of moisture. It just seems that we have a lot of horses that are susceptible to that. So we brought her in, realized that there was more stuff going on, it wasn't just her feet. She then began to kind of present more like the stringhalt type thing.
She had a very exaggerated gate with her right hind leg whereas she would walk, she would bring it way out to the side. And so right away, we had a vet out for a lameness evaluation. So the first vet that looked at her, we thought it was probably a stringhalt type thing brought on by a traumatic injury to the sensory nerves to the extension muscles.
And so we were told to rightly just stall rest, do a little bit of correction with our farrier, put some shoes on her because they also had some sensitivity of the hoof. And then she was also on ... at first it was Bute, but after a couple of weeks being on Bute, we took it to [inaudible 00:08:56] just so we didn't have to worry about the source as well.
And so this kind of continued on probably for another month and then we had another vet out. We just weren't seeing any headway with this. And the same thing was by the second vet, that it was probably a stringhalt, but probably maybe she slipped while she was out on pasture. So we continued the cycle again, we started on the Bute, she was still on a stall rest.
And there was still no help, she still was lame. We couldn't even take her for walks at this point. So that's when I happened to be on Facebook, I was managing my rescue page, and one of your ads popped up and it was one with a video. And it was a horse that had similar movement in the hind end, just kind of a mystery lameness.
And it showed the before and the after video with this horse. So I called you right away and told you what was going on and asked if you could send me a couple samples just to get started. So we had tried everything I felt like, why not give this a shot? So putting on that, I really feel like it was not more than a week, definitely not weeks, that there was dramatic change.
Equinety As A Last Hope Without Any Other Meds
When we brought her out of her stall to give her supplements, she could walk out of the stall. She didn't have that where she'd pulled her leg out to the side. The softness in her eyes, just all the pain was gone. It was just ... we were all shocked.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, yeah. Now, so you're taking a horse that obviously in a lot of pain and you were ... well, would it be fair to say you were kind of at your wit's end? I mean, you'd try to all kinds of other things and didn't really know what else to do and this horse is obviously not comfortable in any way.
Teri Allen:
Right, absolutely. I feel like if we hadn't stumbled on this, I was getting to a point at least that ... especially with the rescue work I do, if a horse does not have the quality of life to be a horse, then sometimes the best option is making a really hard decision. But absolutely I felt like this was our last shot.
John Dowdy:
Right. Yeah, I'll jump in there because I believe the one that you're referring to, we actually have a podcast on that one. That's number 15, horse's name is Monty. And this particular horse had stepped on something out in the field which brought up an abscess and then it turned to thrush, then cellulitis, had a heat stroke.
And watching that video is heartbreaking because this horse could put zero weight on its back left leg. And in about a week of being on product, it doesn't even look like the same horse. I mean, you wouldn't even know anything was wrong with this horse. So if you're tuning in, that's number 15 on that podcast.
But so this one, this Morgan was ... when you saw that video you're like, "Well, that's kind of what seems like what's going on with this one." So after about a week on Equinety and here we go. So how long has Lacey been on the product up to this point and how is she doing now?
Teri Allen:
Right. So she's been on the product now for about six months. When we saw such a huge difference, of course since she was our first one we tried on this, we continued with doing stall rest mostly. And slowly started doing the taking her back to hand walking, getting her back to doing some light conditioning work.
And then it probably may be two weeks later we decided to try and take her off of all the other medicine just to make sure she was still doing okay, but we did keep her on the Equinety. And she continued to be totally sound. She continued to just improve with her overall muscling, her muscle tone, her topline, everything was starting to come back.
And this is a horse that had been on stall rest for about six to eight weeks at that point. So she was looking pretty ragged, so just not only seeing her be fun again, but to see these improvements, her coat condition, her muscling just wasn't tight anymore, was just incredible to see.
How Equinety Works & What It Is?
John Dowdy:
Yeah, that is awesome. Well, I think the best advice here for anybody that might be dealing with ... it doesn't matter really what the situation is. But if you feel like you're at your wit's end and don't know what else to try because you've tried everything else, give Equinety a shot.
And for those of you tuning in for the first time, what the Equinety product is, it's 100% pure amino acids which are specifically formulated to stimulate the pituitary gland which is the master gland in the body. And that's what releases the necessary hormones which then help heal at a cellular level.
So what's really neat about this product, there's no fillers, no sugars, no starches, there's no loading dose. And serving size is 5.2 grams which is not quite a tablespoon. But in this example ... and as we go on, we're going to talk about five different horses with kind of five different issues and what we're going to find is it's customizing to each horse.
Because we're giving the horse what it needs to release its own hormones which then the body decides where to send those hormones for the healing, so that's why this product is unique. It can do so many different things from one extreme thing to another.
So as we've just spoke about in this example, we're dealing with stringhalts, some stifle issues, and you were at your wit's end and this Morgan's now doing great. So now ... and Lacey was the horse that you initially were purchasing the product for, but after you saw the results that happened with her, then you had three rescue horses.
And so you're thinking, "Well, let's see what it can do with these." What was going on with these particular three rescue horses?
Back to Teri & Three Other Horses with Navicular
Teri Allen:
Well, in all the years training and boarding, I really hadn't dealt with any horses with muscular type issues. But a lot of times, we find that these horses that are sent through auction are having nonspecific lameness issues again. The owners just don't want to work with a vet, they don't want to try and treat it.
So a lot of these horses that we find have different usually hoof issues and we just so happened, in probably about a six month time period, we had three different horses come in into the rescue. They actually all had been adopted. They were doing pretty good with us and we just knew that if we kept up with the farrier care, they were doing okay.
Two of these horses ended up, through no fault of their own, coming back into our rescue and they were presenting with some hoof issues. So right away, when we get horses in or these horses, our only two horses that had come back ever in a rescue, we had the vet out to do lameness exam and we wanted him to go ahead and take some x-rays on these horses.
And again, with the X rays, it was pretty nonspecific. There was nothing blaringly obvious, but just from the heel pressure pain and the way the horses were moving, they were diagnosed with pre-navicular syndrome. We also then had a horse that had been moving pretty sound that had been adopted and he started then also presenting with similar stuff going on.
And again, he was also diagnosed with pre-navicular syndrome. With that, working with these vets, we did the whole protocol for the vicular stuff which included corrective shoeing. We put pads on these horses. They were all given the Osphos, some of them multiple doses, a couple of them were on isoxsuprine, and they were all on Equioxx to try and help.
So they all had kind of varying degrees and it was not always consistent on how they were presenting, but it was all similar. They were all going through the same thing, it was all stemming from the hoof. So absolutely we decided to try these horses on the Equinety. So the couple that had been adopted, we started them, we gave them a couple of the samples that you sent to us.
And these guys took a little bit longer. With Lacey, it was such an immediate improvement, but we stuck with it. We were probably about three weeks in when when our first one, Reeses, started moving much more sound. We ended up ... the pads were not helping, the shoeing was not helping because with these horses, if we add shoes into the mix, once feet start growing out, a lot of times it actually hurts horses more.
Because they can't change, the shoes don't give to the pressure that that they need if they're just barefoot. When they're barefoot, we can easily just trim them more consistently or maybe file a little bit of their foot off. So the shoeing we were finding was actually a little detrimental on helping these horses. So again, we started them on this Equinety and we saw the improvement with Reeses.
The farrier came out, we actually pulled the shoes on her and she continued to do great. These other two took a little bit longer. It was probably about four or five weeks that we noticed these other two, Artex and Gambler, starting to move sound. So again, shoes came off, the horses were moving much better and only change we made is as they were on the product longer, we started weaning them off the other stuff.
So first the shoes and then the isoxsuprine and then the very last was the Equioxx. And again, with all three of these horses have been the similar issues. They were all moving much more sound. It was just incredible to watch. So with Reeses, she happened to steal the heart of our trainer, Jax, and she adopted her even though she was right in the middle of dealing with these hoof issues.
And she started using her for riding lessons so it was cool to see this horse that had come back to us and was in pretty rough shape being loved on, being used by these kids, having something that she enjoyed doing was really incredible. But I can remember a couple of weeks back they had pulled the horse out, they were doing in the lesson and in this horse was moving lame again.
So they ended up having to skip the lesson, put Reeses back away. And after the lesson, Jax and I were talking and she had run out of the Equinety product and it had been about four days earlier that this had happened. And she had just thought since she was moving so well that it was probably not going to be a big deal, but this horse had significant lameness again, enough so she couldn't do the lesson.
So right there to us, or at least for myself, I thought, "Oh my gosh, it was Equinety, it's working." So of course we got her back on it as soon as we could and within the next week, she was back to being used for lessons again. So really then having two horses who had had such improvement, that was just incredible for me to see.
John Dowdy:
Right. Yeah, and I think it's important because oftentimes we'll get questions, the Equinety Horse XL, should I just use it to try to fix whatever issue I'm having and then I don't have to use it anymore or is this a lifelong commitment? And so the best way to answer this, if you're listening obviously you've just heard what happens, which is very typical when you take the horse off of the product.
And because what this product is ultimately doing is giving the body what it needs to release the hormones which help heal at a cellular level. The hormones that are released have a 23 and a half hour life cycle, so this is why you give the product every day. So in the example that you gave, we were able to increase the hormone levels by giving the amino acids.
And after X amount of time, those hormone levels are elevated at the highest levels that they can be. And when you stop giving the product, then the hormone levels just went back to the way they were prior to giving the Equinety so that's where the lameness came back in. And then when you started giving the product again, it just increased the hormone levels and now the horse is sound again.
So we have people that have tried this voluntarily and seen results. And then we've had cases like this where it was involuntary because people ran out or they're having someone else feed the product and didn't know that they were out and all of a sudden their horse is lame again. So I think you or the people that have this as a question, you'll find that once you start using the product, you probably don't want to stop giving the product.
Teri Allen:
Correct.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into the last horse here that we're going to talk about. And I know you have a lot of other stories, but I think this is just a great example. And again, kissing spine which often comes up and I haven't really been able to give anybody a definite yea or nay on this. And again, we also have to keep in mind the severity of what's going on with the horse.
The Equinety product isn't the end all be all. I tell people that used in combination with you know, corrective shoeing or proper care and proper feeding, this product is an amazing product to add to your existing program. And when it comes to kissing spine, I mean, which is a horrible thing in and of itself, but it can always benefit. This product can always benefit no matter what is going on.
But let's get right into this. What was going on with this seven year old and what happened? Or what was going on and then what happened after giving the product?
Cola & Kissing Spine
Teri Allen:
Well, so this horse's name is Cola and she belongs to a dear friend of mine, Andy. And Andy, I had her start her other horse, Tyson, who was one of our rescues that she adopted, on the product. He's an older horse, he has some arthritis kind of through his whole body. And she was seeing such great results with him that she decided to start Cola on this.
Cola, a couple of years back, was having issues with her training. I was her trainer, she was very unhappy to work, we would get the full attitude. This horse has attitude anyways, but we would get the full attitude when we'd go to tack her up. We'd get attitude as we would do the groundwork with her. And then when a person would get on her, it just escalated.
She was not happy to work. She would grind your teeth. She would swish her tail. She was showing us that something wasn't quite right even though she was moving sound with her groundwork. Just from what she was telling us, we knew we had to dig deeper. So we did schedule an appointment to take her in and she did have x-rays done and it was found that she had kissing spine so it wasn't super severe.
It didn't make it so she was not rideable, but they started her on a series of different, again, injections not only into the spine but also kind of with this horse compensating for that. She was having some soreness issues with her hocks and her backend. And if anybody has been around the horses and you start on the cycle of medical fixing of some of these lameness issues, it gets super, super expensive.
Andy dumped so much money into try and get this horse comfortable and moving sound that we kind of got to the point that was it worth continually dumping the money into the injections? This horse was given some time off. We had her put out on pasture, she was still getting daily Equioxx.
But for the injections, since it just became so expensive and we weren't seeing any kind of significant improvement, we decided that it was probably not helping her enough with the money that was going out so that was a couple of years ago. So Andy would still bring her in, she would groom her, she would love her.
But really riding was kind of out of her day to day stuff just because she didn't want to cause any pain with this horse. So she started her on Equinety and now it's been I think close to three months and just to see the changes come over this horse was pretty incredible. This horse that had attitude just with grooming, just with the brushing, because she knew it was going to lead to the tacking up, the saddling.
She would have such attitude on the ground and that started to improve. And so as that started to improve, Andy started doing some saddle work again, just some light, light conditioning on the ground. And then we started doing a couple of lessons again together. And what I noticed is even though we were doing a super light workout, this horse that always, always would have her ears can back or her tail swishing or her teeth grinding, that was gone.
She was starting ... her whole attitude was starting to improve. So to me, just seeing that, she was still on the Equioxx, but just by adding this Equinety in just to see some of these overall changes, this mare who definitely had sensitive skin issues, those seemed to disappear. This mare who when she'd come into season would be incredibly, incredibly mare-ish.
We couldn't keep her in pasture with another horse, she just had attitude over the top about ... yeah, anytime she was in heat. It was almost that we kind of avoided working her.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, watch out. Yep.
Teri Allen:
Yeah, watch out. And Andy, who is just such a sweet lady and such a great rider, didn't ever feel comfortable working this horse on her own. We always had to work together, just this horse was that kind of horse. She was so smart that she could figure out what would get her out of working. So she always at that point had always worked with lessons with me.
So as she's been on this product more and more, Andy is coming out. Andy is working this horse on her own. And just to see these changes, not only for the horse, but the confidence of the rider, to me that's so impressive. Because we can work together and I've worked with Andy for going on four years now with just lessons.
And just to see her change since her horse's attitude has changed was really, really great to see. So needless to say, that horse will be on the product forever. It's just really, really great to see that change.
John Dowdy:
That's great. Wow. Well, I think anybody tuning in to this one definitely should have received value. I really appreciate your time. I know you are super busy, especially with 55 head there, so I appreciate you taking the time to share your stories here on the Equinety podcast.
And before we sign off here, would you mind giving everybody your website or the best way to maybe contact you or maybe look at your facility or if they're looking to do donations of any kind or anything like that, what would be the best way for them to find you?
Teri Allen:
Sure. Well, we're on Facebook, it's Terolyn Horse Rescue. And we also have a website, it's www.terolynhorserescue.org. And also you could call me any time and if you have any messages or want to volunteer or want to make a donation, we can always, always use that. And my direct line is (303) 243-1147.
John Dowdy:
Okay. And would you do a favor force and just spell that a website out for us?
Teri Allen:
Sure. It's T-E-R-O-L-Y-N-H-O-R-S-E-R-E-S-C-U-E.org.
John Dowdy:
Okay, perfect. Well, Teri, I really appreciate you taking the time and I know a lot of people are going to get a lot out of this one. So Teri Allen out of Elizabeth, Colorado, thank you so much for taking the time here on the Equinety podcast.
Teri Allen:
Thank you for having me.
John Dowdy:
Oh, you bet. Bye bye.
