07/14/2026
Horses are so incredibly tough and resilient but also can be so dumb as well.
Lottie who is 3, experienced a very severe choking episode. She started last Wednesday (July 8th) evening, although I did not discover her choking until mid morning Thursday (July 9th) and we did not get it resolved until late morning Friday (July 10th).
Aydon and I were working in the barn Wednesday evening and had the 4 girls grazing in the yard. We had the doors open because it was hot. The girls were being nosy and trying to break into the barn Lottie actually squeezed through the barn doors to snoop. So I locked them back up and then went ahead a fed them their pellets and hay for the evening. All was fine. Thursday morning I opened the gate to let them out to their pasture to graze and I took off to take mineral out to the broodmares and to the geldings in a different pasture so I was gone majority of the morning and didn’t see the girls as they didn’t meet me at the gate to go out to graze but still had some hay left over from the night before so figured they were just full. I get home and that is when I noticed Lottie with green fluid pouring out of her nose so realized pretty quick she was choking. So off we went to Provost Vet clinic. We worked on her for 3.5hrs. Giving her breaks and letting her rest so not to stress her out too much, and kept topping off her meds to keep sleepy and her head as low as possible. Honestly Provost was great but this was way past their comfort zones as both ML and Chris said this was the worst choke they ever seen. She was packed solid. The stuff we were flushing out of her esophagus was definitely alfalfa pellets, so we all figured she was choking on them. They sent me home with some medication for her and said if it’s pellets they should dissolve over night… hopefully. If not bring her back in in the morning. I was already heading to Momentum Equine Friday morning for some routine exams on some saddle horses, so I called there as I left Provost and explained what was going on, they told me to bring her with me if it didn’t resolve over night. Well it didn’t resolve over night so away we went to Momentum. Same thing there, they told me this was one of the worst cases of choke they have dealt with. We scoped her and couldn’t get very far before running into feed. So they flushed, some more came out and then we scoped again. This time we seen that she had a small tear starting in her mucosa lining of her esophagus…. Not good at all. We got a little further in and found the mass… a ball of wood shavings, scratching the surface of her esophagus as it moved down to her stomach… now she’s at high risk of her esophagus rupturing. Not good news… probable outcome would be to euthanize. But Dr. Tara gave me some options and we opted to ultrasound her lungs and see how much fluid was in them due to her aspirating. Surprisingly enough her lungs looked pretty good. A small amount of fluid but considering how long she had been choking and how much water was being used to flush her they looked pretty good. So we decided to flush her again, gently… give it another 15 min and see what would happen. A couple flush’s later a bunch of stuff came out and then they were able to push the tube in more. Flushed again and more stuff came out this time it looked different, determined it was stomach bile. So we scoped her again. The mass of shavings was gone! Yay! However we found she had around 30cm of bruising in her esophagus due to the shavings slowly sliding down and sitting there. High risk of that dying and sloughing off, essentially would cause her esophagus to rupture. So she stayed at the clinic all weekend on IV antibiotics and the soupiest mash possible. They scoped her again this morning and noted that the mucosa tear was nearly gone and hard to find now, the bruising was going back to normal and her coughing was getting less and less so she was able to come home.
Lottie is far from safe just yet as she does have pneumonia from aspirating, she is on heavy duty antibiotics and did develop ulcers from this trauma so is now on omeperzole. But she’s home, looking like 💩 from not eating for 2 days straight and happy to be back with her friends.
So while Lottie had the privilege of hanging out and grazing in the yard, she lived up to her nickname “Naughty Lottie”, and tore open a bag of shavings and ate some. That didn’t panic her though and she continued to eat and live her best life until her entire esophagus was filled full and there was no where left for food to go. So this is the part where they can be so dumb comes into play her. She is one tough filly but could still use some prayers and healing vibes to get her through the next stages of healing.
I am so thankful for the vets that worked on her and took this issue very seriously. I have never dealt with choke to this extent and let me tell you it was very scary. Lottie is a true gem though and knew we were helping her, she was so easy to handle and deal with, and stayed so calm considering the destress she was in.
In the pictures, the first two are of Friday morning. Not much discharge coming out her nose, so I thought maybe it was resolved, until she turned and walked away and it all started pouring out again 😬.
