Stacy Kirby – Severe Condition - Hooves cut really short – Muscle Atrophy – Dinero is back
John Dowdy:
Hello, and welcome to this week's Equinety podcast. We are swinging out into California. We've got Stacy Kirby on the podcast this week. Stacy, welcome to the Team Equinety podcast.
Stacy Kirby:
Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you.
John Dowdy:
Well, you are very welcome. I saw your story, and this is just another jaw-dropper. Just in a quick, CliffsNotes version, so everybody tuning in. We've got a beautiful paint horse that was cut super short. You went through all kinds of troubles, thought you were going to have to put him down. Then you came across the Equinety product, and with the help of your vet and farrier, he's pretty much back. Is that it in a super nutshell?
Stacy Kirby:
That's the Reader's Digest version. Yes.
John Dowdy:
Okay, well let's get into some detail, and if you're tuning in and you've got some hoof issues or some lameness issues, or just you want your horse to feel better from the inside out. Because this product, what's unique about it, the Equinety Horse XL, is it doesn't fit into a specific horse supplement category. In other words, it's not a "hoof supplement, joint supplement, muscle-building supplement, et cetera, et cetera." It's giving the body what it needs to help repair at the cellular level, so it encompasses everything in the horse. So with all that said, tell us about Denaro. Now, by the way, we're just talking about this one horse. But you've had horses all your life, so what made this one so special?
Stacy Kirby:
Oh, Denaro. We were from Colorado. We had a nice little ranch in Colorado, and our neighbor bred Denaro and we fell in love. He was just different from birth. A lot of personality. Lots of spunk in his eyes. He has one blue eye, one brown eye, and I always ask him, "Are you giving me the blue today or the brown eye?"
John Dowdy:
That's good.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah. I'm smiling as I talk, because we love him. So my husband started working with Denaro and trained him in the way that was appropriate for what my husband, what we were all doing at the time in Colorado. My husband did cows up in the Rocky Mountains with his best buddy, Donny Shahan; I have to mention his name. Incredible man. Centennial Coloradan. Had a ranch there. His family has a ranch there still, for hundreds of years. Bob and Donny would ride up in the mountains and bring down cows, and Denaro did everything.
The unique thing for me is that Denaro was such a transitional horse. He'd come home after. Like they'd be gone for eight or 10 hours, and he'd come home and go, "Ahhh." It was just like [inaudible 00:03:06]. He was so tired and he got all the lollygag treatment, and we just loved him. Then our daughter had twins, little girls, and they would come from California to Colorado. Literally when they were three months old, we put them on Denaro and he just knew the difference. He was that horse. I hope every horse person in their life gets one of those horses. They change your whole life. And so that's our Denaro.
He was wonderful. I suffered, I was explaining to John before. I suffered a pretty massive head injury, and it was decided that we would come back to California to be near our family, our children and grandchildren. So Denaro came back with us to California, and we currently live in Joshua Tree. We immediately found a great vet and an incredible shoer that we really liked, and everything was grand until our shoer was injured. Two unqualified people came on January 21st of this year, 2021. The narrow was extremely short cut in the front, and short cut in the back also. The cut were so bad that his frogs swelled up and were emitting blood. I took pictures of them, and that's how the injury to the narrow began.
John Dowdy:
Wow.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah.
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
It was bad.
John Dowdy:
Just that fast.
Stacy Kirby:
That bad and that fast. I don't know if you want me to keep on talking, so I will until you say, "Let me ask you something."
John Dowdy:
Well, no, I think everybody, and I'm sure there's a lot of people that have been through a similar situation like that, which is horrifying because now, what were you faced with at this point? What was going through your mind? The obvious things, but were you looking at anything and everything to try to now get Denaro repaired as fast as possible? What were some of the things you were looking for?
Stacy Kirby:
You know, in the beginning I thought- Immediately we called the vet because Denaro, we got him back to a stall, but he went down and he never got back up after that day. The vet came out, she called in a different shoer. I call it the the dental press stuff. It's like this gooey stuff when you get a new tooth, they make you do that in your mouth.
John Dowdy:
Yes.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah, that stuff. This new shoer put that in his feet, all four, and then put pads on. But Denaro still didn't get up. We would go out, the twins now by this time are seven. They would go out and hand feed him as he was laying down. They would take water in a large syringe and put it in his mouth. It was that bad.
My husband and I, and this is truly his baby, but everybody loves this horse. My husband and I started considering what are we going to do? We would get tow straps and lift him up to make him stand. Once he stood, he would wobble over to the water. This is true, I actually have videos of it. He would drink and then he'd lay back down. This continued for approximately six to eight weeks. He was on heavy drugs, I think it's called Gabapentin.
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
Then, of course, Bute for a while, but you can only do Bute so long. So he was flipped over to Equinoxx. And I forgot to say this, we had a chiropractor come out and she did acupuncture to him. I mean, we went through everything.
So now he would stand up and he would just stand in one place. He wouldn't engage in walking. So my daughter, being the internet girl that she is, got on some site and she said, "Mom, look at this stuff," and she's reading it to me. I said it sounds good, just order it. She ordered the first batch of Equinety, and my dates are probably off, but I believe that was in March, the injury happening in January. I think it was March or April. We started double dosing him. I believe the container said two scoops, and we went two in the morning and maybe one, an extra one or two at night. We were doing anything. I know you can, I don't encourage people to overdose something, but at this point when you're desperate.
Then we started just doing Equinety daily in his feed, and we noticed an improvement. Denaro started to walk. It wasn't much at first, it was just little steps, but he was walking. For us, that was a miracle. We had truly come to the point prior to seeing a little movement, we had come to the decision to euthanize him. I think that's why I'm getting choked up, because I thought, "No, not this horse, please." And prayer was included. Believe me, John, we prayed, "Please, God, this is just such a great horse." The twins would come every other day and just pet him and touch him.
But so we see this improvement in Denaro, and the vet says, "You need to get him moving now, because now, being down for so long." He's 18 years old, by the way, I forgot to say that. He's atrophying. His legs are stiff as a board. So now we're walking him. The goal in the beginning was walk 10 feet, turn around. By the way, he couldn't turn and pivot. You had to make a place big enough for a 16 and a half hand horse to go, whoa. A big round turn.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah, yeah. We'd get him back in his area. We had probably six to eight inches of play sand delivered so it'd be nice and soft for him in recovery. And we continued. Then we thought, okay, if the muscles are all atrophied, and we're dealing with this hoof injury, we went ahead and bought the Bemer horse system. We started him on the Bemer, and that was every day.
John Dowdy:
Now, for those who aren't familiar with the Bemer system, what exactly is that, real quick?
Stacy Kirby:
It's an electronic pulsing, kind of like when you go to the chiropractor and they put that tensing unit on you. Have you ever done that?
John Dowdy:
I have not.
Stacy Kirby:
Okay. If you go the chiropractor, there's thing called a tensing unit, and they put it on you prior to him cracking your bones, or her. So a Bemer system, it's a blanket and leg wrap. So he'd get the whole blanket on his body and he'd get the leg wraps on his fronts, especially. We'd do that for a half hour every day, tensing. It's just like electronic (zap). I make a noise for not knowing what...
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
Little, little zapping, and it kind of wakes your muscles up. So we did that. The interesting reason I bring that up is now Denaro is walking a little better. He's got his Equinety, he's got his Bemer, and I'm thinking, okay, we can stop. We bought the Bemer, so we can stop the Equinety because he's walking now. I would say within two to three weeks, probably two, but I'll stretch it to three. We noticed the decline, instantly. He wasn't walking so well, he wasn't doing so well. I looked at my husband and I said, "Well, there I go. That was a stupid mistake." He goes, "You better get in there and order that right now."
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
So I- Go ahead
John Dowdy:
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Stacy Kirby:
No, no please.
John Dowdy:
Well, what I was going to explain for those that are tuning in, and this happens a lot, believe it or not. People have an injured horse or there's something, mystery lameness thing, or there's something going on and they're looking for a solution. A lot of times they'll get the Equinety product, the Equinety Horse XL, and more times than not, in the very high 90th percentile, it fixes the horse right up. Then they think, "Well, I don't need this anymore," so they stop. What happens is that the horse regresses back to what was happening before. That's when they realize, "Hey, I've got to have this stuff every day."
What's going on in the body, and I mentioned it a little bit at the front end of the podcast, but the amino acids in the in Equinety Horse XL are specific to giving the body what it needs to release the repairing hormones from the pituitary gland. When this can happen, which it happens in hours, by the way, the body is able to send its own hormones to its own problem areas. That's why it helps in so many ways and why it's not categorized in a specific supplement category. It's not a quote "host supplement, joint supplement, muscle building, et cetera," because what we're doing is we're given the body what it needs, and then the body can send its own hormones to its own problem area.
You could have 50 horses with 50 different things going on and it's going to customize to each one. At the same time there will be similarities with all of them. The stronger, thicker soles, all around healthier hoof, better joints, they move better. They're happier, they feel good. So from the extremes of what we're talking about here, all the way to the high performance horse, and the pasture ornaments and rescues.A lot of people use it as a preventative. In that case, there's nothing going on.
Then the other thing I want to touch upon is, you mentioned double dosing, and even throwing in some extra on top of that, which is fine, by the way.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah.
John Dowdy:
We need to get him back quick. The science behind that is, if you give a scoop of the Horse XL in the morning, for an example. By the way, a scoop is 5.2 grams; it's about like a teaspoon. It's based on the size of the pituitary gland, not on the size of the animal. So whether it's a tiny mini or a big draft horse, they all get the same dose. It starts working right away. Those hormones are released from the pituitary, and those hormones have a 23 and a half hour life cycle. So if you give a scoop in the morning, the hormones are released, does the things it needs to do. By the time you give a scoop the following morning, the hormone levels are back to where they would normally be for that age of the horse, which is perfectly fine. It works perfectly fine this way.
With an injured horse or one that's coming back from an injury or surgery, or for the working, performance horse, we recommend giving a scoop in the morning and a scoop in the evening. This is not a loading dose, because there is no loading dose with this product. Giving a scoop in the morning and a scoop in the evening; what that's doing is it's keeping the hormone levels elevated, and so it helps promote faster recovery. Then you get into a working, performance horse, it also helps with the stamina and the focus and things like that. But giving a scoop in the morning and a scoop in the evening is perfectly fine. If you give more than that, I don't know that it's doing anything.
Stacy Kirby:
Right.
John Dowdy:
But under the circumstances you were in, it's like, hey, more is better, it's got to be.
Stacy Kirby:
Exactly, exactly.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, yeah. So anyways, yeah. That's a little of the inside and the science and why it works so well. Then as I mentioned also, before, I tell people this is not a miracle supplement; it's not the end all be all, but it really helps get your horse back to where you want them to be, quicker, and working in combination with a good vet and farrier, and proper nutrition. It takes all these pieces, but the Equinety Horse XL will really help jumpstart all that very, very quickly. We've just seen it over and over and over. We've been on the market now eight years, and the podcast has been going for about three, just capturing stories like this and they're all over the board. From the extreme to NFR and high-end English and everything else, it's pretty amazing. We are definitely blessed.
So how long has Denaro now been on product?
Stacy Kirby:
He's been on product, other than that two weeks I made that mistake, approximately six months; six, seven months. I'm bad with timelines, John. But he'll never be off again. I want to do a simple analogy, because what you said made so much sense to me. I'm a florist and a horticulturalist, and when a tree or a bush has a little broken limb, or a bend is even a better way to say it.
John Dowdy:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Stacy Kirby:
Most people don't know if you go and cut that off, it's better for the bush, because the bush will continue sending energy to that broken or bent limb, using all of its energy there. Where in Denaro's case, when I cut him off, the energy that you guys, your product, was giving him, went away so quickly and his body didn't know what to do. I know that doesn't make sense to you, maybe, but to me, we had to correct and give those injuries something good to feed it.
John Dowdy:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.
Stacy Kirby:
And Equinety is it, for me. I'll never, ever let him run out again. He deserves that. He deserves that. And I broke it down. I think we're talking less than a dollar a day, cost.
John Dowdy:
Yep. That's right.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah. Yeah. For real, I hit my head. Why would I even... I slapped myself in the head probably before my husband had the chance to. Knuckle head, what were you thinking?
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
And you get into these, because I shared with you, we're regular people. Denaro is not a show horse, although he's starting to live up to his name. His registered name is actually Mucho Denaro, can you imagine?
John Dowdy:
Oh yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah. But he's worth a million dollars to us, so why would I not think that a dollar a day isn't worth the cost for his health? That's all.
John Dowdy:
Yep. And you know the product just helps in so many ways, and being on the market for eight years, and we just hear the stories over and over and over. So many people have implemented this into their feeding program, and with being on the market for so long, it doesn't matter if you're in a high-end performance barn that the best of the best of everything, and the best nutrition and care and all that stuff, down to you just have some trail horses or you're in the rescue.
Stacy Kirby:
Yeah, yeah.
John Dowdy:
This one scoop of product, it helps every single one of them. And if you break it all down, horses that are being cared for by man just aren't getting the right amount of amino acids, is really what it comes down to. That's what you have to deduce from that. And being on the market for years and hearing all these stories.
One of the other things I think is important too, if you're really thinking about this product and giving it a try. One of the big questions that we get, or most often asked questions is, do I need to stop using other things and just start using this? Our recommendation is not change anything you're doing and just add the scoop of Equinety, because it's only 5.2 grams, like a teaspoon. This way you're only changing one thing, because you already have a baseline of what your horse is doing or not doing with the other things you're using.
Stacy Kirby:
Right. Correct.
John Dowdy:
So when you add one scoop of a Equinety, it starts working within hours. A lot of people see changes within two or three days, and I'm talking demeanor, stress, anxiety, things like that. You get into the couple weeks mark, people start noticing they are better under saddle, they recover faster; this is more for the working performance horse. But then you get into the 30-day mark, you're going to start noticing softer, shinier coat; they're filling out. Even some better cliff growth, believe it or not, in as little as 30 days; more towards the six-week mark. But it really just gets better after that.
In Denaro's case, where he was really cut short. This is a pretty extreme case, to the point where you were thinking about putting him down.
Stacy Kirby:
Yes.
John Dowdy:
It just takes a long time to grow stuff. I say stuff, but we're talking the hooves here.
Stacy Kirby:
I know.
John Dowdy:
And so when you're talking, even from the beginning of the year, or 8, 10, 11 months.
Stacy Kirby:
Yes.
John Dowdy:
It's pretty incredible that he's back to where he is now. How is his demeanor at this point?
Stacy Kirby:
Okay. I'd love to share that, because I think my tree analogy was kind of... I always think, "Stacy, where will you go with that?" It's the brain injury.
John Dowdy:
I think the tree analogy is great.
Stacy Kirby:
It's the brain injury. But back to Denaro. In seriousness, I want to share with you guys, and I will almost, probably will, start crying. Denaro is being ridden again.
John Dowdy:
Oh my gosh.
Stacy Kirby:
The twins, we started with the twins. One of them only weighs, they each only weigh 45 pounds; they're skinny little things. So we put a bareback pad on him, and Sadie, because Denaro is so tall, she's the bravest of him.
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
Because it would be his first ride since the injury. We were trusting Sadie with him, and Sadie got on him with just his halter; you don't even have to put a bit in Denaro's mouth. And he just walked around the arena so gently. I think we all cried. And then J.C. of course, then Sissy had to get on, then they both got on. We started with lightly, with one a week, two laps of the arena. Because everything had to go slow, everything.
John Dowdy:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.
Stacy Kirby:
And then we started with, we put just the bareback pad. We tried to keep no weight on him, because it did take forever for the fronts to grow out. He got his first actual trim a month ago.
John Dowdy:
Wow.
Stacy Kirby:
That's how long it took for them to grow out.
John Dowdy:
Yep.
Stacy Kirby:
But then we put the bareback pad and our daughter got on because she's only 120 pounds or whatever. We did everything, and like you said, adding light progression to this. Now I'm so happy to say my husband got on Denaro and rode him out onto some soft.. We have lots of dirt roads out here in Joshua Tree, and did it by himself, Bob and Denaro. I did, I cried that day. I was like, "Thank you, God," because this just meant the world to us. To conclude on the riding, I got on my big horse and my husband and I rode together last week for about a half hour, 40 minutes. We could see at the end of the ride it was time to bring Denaro home, and we did.
John Dowdy:
Yep.
Stacy Kirby:
We stayed just around the property, but it made Denaro so happy and it made us so grateful. So that is how he is progressing now. We anticipate that soon, we don't know exactly when.
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
We'll be able to get on Denaro, or put him in the trailer like we used to, and go trailer out someplace special and all ride together like we always did. But one step at a time, John, but always forward. That's our motto now.
John Dowdy:
That's right.
Stacy Kirby:
That's our motto.
John Dowdy:
Yeah. And I think, too, those that are tuning in and looking for a solution, I always tell people, because I've been asked this question multiple times. People feel like they're at the end of the rope, they don't know what else to do, they've tried all kinds of things. Then the question is, do you think this product will work? The Equinety Horse XL is what we're talking about. I always tell them that it is so much worth the try because the odds of it working are so high. Again, we can't go against Mother Nature if it's the inevitable, but in pretty much every single case, we've heard so many great stories. You look at this from, it's taken basically the whole year to get this horse. Now you're riding again. That's just incredible.
Stacy Kirby:
We're riding him. We're riding, we're riding. I listen to your voice and your voice sounds so kind. But if there really is someone out there listening, just on that edge, I would tell you it is worth it. Because you can hear in my voice that we horse people, we love our horses, and we'd do just about anything. Do it. Just do it. You won't regret it, but don't stop it like I did for two weeks.
John Dowdy:
Yeah.
Stacy Kirby:
But you will not regret it. It's such a doable addition to your horse's daily life. Give it a chance. What have you got to lose? I think you just said that.
John Dowdy:
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Stacy Kirby out of California, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story about Denaro here on the Team Equinety podcast.
Stacy Kirby:
John, it's been my honor, and God bless you guys, really. I hope you have a magical, magical holiday season and Merry Christmas, and thank you. We really do thank you guys from the bottom of our heart. Thank you.
John Dowdy:
Oh, you bet. Thank you so much, and God bless.
Stacy Kirby:
Okay. Bye-bye.
John Dowdy:
Bye-bye.
