PINPOINTING PROBLEM

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If you’re confident you’ve identified the potentially sore limb, start checking for obvious injuries or areas of heat or swelling. You may not find anything. A hoof abscess, for instance, won’t reveal itself beyond the lameness. But a puffy, sensitive tendon on a lame leg is a good bet for what’s bothering the horse and information you’ll want to pass along to your veterinarian.

I hear from a lot of owners that a make that determination. It’s a complex limb and your eyes just aren’t reliable enough to know where the lameness is coming from just by watching the horse move. Whenever possible, we try to block out the lameness just as we would in the front limb.

As you get higher up in the hindquarters, lameness is a diagnosis of exclusion: If blocks and imaging show nothing from the stifle down, the problem could be in the horse’s hip, sacroiliac joint or even back. Typically hind-limb lameness causes back pain