Michael Blackwell
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Michael Blackwell
I appreciate the invitation to be here today. I have certainly enjoyed the presentations and actually meeting a lot of you for the first time.
So, I know I am standing between you and lunch and having worked in shelters and doing these tests for adoptions, you know part of that testing is food aggression so I can’t recognize it. I would just invite you to just go ahead and we will come along later. No biting. Also, people should know you never invite a veterinarian to talk around the time you are eating. We are notorious with talking about very interesting things over the dinner table. Our families are fine with it but I am just warning you I have to talk about some things that may or may not settle well with you.
I am reminded of the days when my dad was practicing in Oklahoma. He had a mixedpractice and, of course, I had one out there. My first practice was in Oklahoma and you know there are a lot of beef cattle out in Oklahoma. Typically, when you are going out to see a problem with beef cattle we would say something like, well, we are going to go out here and check these cows so that we can tell the owner what is wrong with them. But I learned also that whenever we were going to see a horse it was like well we are going to go out there and check this horse so the horse owner can tell us what we are supposed to do for him. So, I want to say, when I give this presentation just cut me a little slack. I know you know a few things I probably don’t know.
I heard earlier this puzzling question, you know, how can this be still going on after so many years and it is not puzzling to me. I am an American. I love my country. I served my country in a uniform for twenty-three years honorably retiring as a Rear Admiral which I think says something. That is not why I was going to say that though. I was going to soften the blow that is coming next. The United States of America from its very beginning has practiced exploitation . Now I know we don’t like to hear that as Americans but if we are talking about a serious subject and I am here advocating for horses at this meeting so I don’t care about your feelings when it comes to being truthful about what facet of our world are we looking at here. We have always had people who would exploit others—other people and animals. And so that is what this is. It is exploitation. There are a lot of things that drive that, whether it is greed or you name it. So, all of the evidence and all of the other things that we say, one it is sitting right there. It is obvious. We have always had those too during periods of exploitation. So, I come at it from that angle. Nothing surprises me when I think of what people are capable of doing and especially to someone or an animal that is innocent and can be subjected to their power and control.
One other thing I would like to just mention and, hopefully, you will take that away from this meeting. The word sore or soring is problematic. Now at my age just waking up and getting out of bed I know what sore means, you know. I played a little sports and I know what it means to be sore. What we are talking about here, folks, is not that kind of sore and what I will cover here is not about something that goes on on the surface. This thing is quite sensitive. Let’s see, okay, but which one is the pointer? Center. The center is the pointer. Okay, so crude anatomy, we have been seeing images of the horses foot, external images. Actual photographs, we have seen radiographs. We’ve seen thermographs.
Let’s look at a different kind of image here and basically what you have is an animal , a beautiful animal, huge animal that stands on its middle digit. It walks on its tiptoes and that is a feat when you think about it. Anybody in here been a ballerina? Okay. Well, they can tell you what that feels like when you have normal digits. If you will look at this image you will notice that it is a tight packet, tight package. There are a bunch of structures in here, some are tendons or ligaments and then you’ve got, you know, other types of tissue, bony tissue and so forth. You’ve got skin over it. You’ve got this hoof wall. That is very, very rigid. It is well designed just like it is. It is well designed. It is like your foot as a normal foot with an ankle and all that articulates properly well designed. But we don’t often think about is how does the blood which is pumped down in here through the arterial system get back up because you’ve got gravity that wants to keep it down in that hoof. Well, well designed. There is a system whereby the blood can actually be pumped back up out of that hoof. Speaking of that system, how does that foot stay in the hoof to start with? Well it is a fascinating anatomical structure. You’ve got the bone, the coffin bone sitting inside this hard walled structure called a hoof and something has to adhere then and it is a structure that is kind of in a lead like this, from the bone side to hoof side and it is not bone against bone. You’ve got delicate tissues that cover all of these surfaces. But it is very tight, well designed. This is what it looks like when you take the hoof off of that foot. These structures you see here are what I am talking about. A little different arrangement around the band area here but you get the point. Delicate tissues separating bone from very hard hoof wall with not a lot of space.
Well, it has already been covered quite well that, you know, soring involves a number of evil designs and techniques. But what it is all about? This was mentioned by Dr. Valk. It is about creating inflammation . Let me just spend just a few moments to talk about what inflammation is and everybody in this room has experienced this and what we are trying to do now is take your reality and connect your reality about pain and about inflammation with what a horse is probably feeling and experiencing when they have an injury, whether it was intentional or not. So, we start out with damage done to the cells. That could be something caustic placed on the pastern. It could be the fact that pressure is applied in crushing some tissue, these delicate tissues inside the hoof. We could go on and on but you do some damage to the cells. This is akin to let’s say you just cut your finger a little bit on a broken glass. Well, the body goes through a determined and predictable sequence of responses to that injury. And it does it because it’s trying to survive. It is saying, oops, we got a problem. We are going to have to fix this. We are going to have to address this in order to make sure we don’t break down in nature.
First thing that happens is a bunch of chemicals gets released. Now these chemicals are there, there are various ones for different reasons but I will cover what the key ones here are. There are chemicals that will cause the blood vessels to start to dilate. Now we see that in a physiologic, where the person blushes, you know the capillaries have dilated and it is obvious that they are embarrassed with something. But we also see it when we suffer an injury and the area starts to look red and through time it starts to get hotter. I am sorry if you can’t read the words here, but the blood vessels have to dilate in order to increase the blood flow. Why do you want to increase the blood flow? Because there is an injury and the body is going to have to bring cells to that area to start repairing itself. It is not going to say, oh these guys are soring me this time. We will skip this step. No, it has to do that. It has to bring the cells in to start repairing. The capillaries, these are the very smaller vessels so they get down to the microscopic size, maybe no wider than a red blood cell, very small. These things start to leak. They don’t normally leak. They are kind of sealed. The walls are sealed in a sense, but these walls start to have pores that will allow things to leak out of the vessels and what leaks out, of course, is a fluid that causes what we call edema which is the swelling. Protein intended to clot if you’ve got an open bleeding area, oh, and by the way, this thing, this external process is going on internally. We are trying to see into the foot and into that area that has been damaged what’s actually happening. It is trying to go in and clot any leakage that may be going on in order to no hemorrhage very much. Well, when you get swelling you are going to get pain. Well why do we get pain when there is swelling? Anybody. Not the veterinarians. Yes, because everywhere blood vessels are flowing we also have nerve fibers and these are generally sensory nerves. They pick up sensations. I can tell you a hoof is just a tooth. It wants really nice sensations because it only knows two, no sensation to speak of. If you don’t have a toothache you understand what I am saying. We don’t think about our teeth because they are happy and they go from that to being very unhappy. All in a heartbeat. I will come back to that.
So, yes the pain is a result of the swelling. Do you remember that little structure we talked about? Do you remember that image back there that showed you the anatomy and how tight everything is. Folks, there is not a lot of room for swelling. If I were to bang my forehead I could get a golf ball-size knot. My brain is fine because it is on this side of my cranium. Guess what, if I got that same swelling inside my cranium I could die actually because whenever there is a solid wall and we have two structures in our body that we can relate to. We’ve got our tooth and we’ve got our cranium. You’ve got something sensitive inside of those that can swell if they are damaged and if they swell there is no expansion. A hoof wall won’t just suddenly start expanding. It tightens up in there. You get this pressure build up and when that pressure builds up there is pain. The only other thing that is not shown here, clearly, is what we call the five, these are the five signs of inflammation. You get redness. You get heat. You get pain. You get swelling and the fifth one is loss or reduction of function. Now, why do we lose function? Well, first of all, it hurts. But in order to heal properly the signal down at my foot says to the brain, hey man, we don’t need to be walking too far today because we’ve got some work down here to do. So it is best that you sit down but if you’ve got to move you move by picking that foot up real quickly. Just don’t put any weight on it because we are trying to repair things down here. The same thing is happening in a horse’s foot. Are we together? Okay.
So, this is about inflammation and inflammation, by definition, is about pain and I don’t mean sore pain, especially given the site. You know I had to look up some images. I don’t like watching images of humans for things like that. I could look at animals all day long. But there is something nasty about humans. I don’t know what it is. How many think that is sore? How do you know that is sore. I mean, did you talk to this guy. I think it is a guy. We pick up a lot by our vision, by our sight. You think it is sore? Is it swollen? Have you ever had anything like that. Uh huh, and what happens if I press on it? What do you think if I was walking on that digit? Now before you answer, this nail has to be much thicker and it has to pretty much completely surround the fingertip and now we are going to do a handstand. Folks, that is not sore. That hurts. That hurts. Oops, see that is just nasty. You know. I sure hope that person is doing all right. But that is sore. Now we can see this on this human and I didn’t use a black person because we want to see and we got this melanin that won’t let you see everything, right? That is the problem with the horse. They got hair and got skin coloration. We want to see what hit looks like when something gets inflamed and it is swollen and that is what is going on at that pastern and on down and worse yet, because of gravity if you do something at the pastern, gravity will cause the fluid to slowly gravitate into the area of the hoof and you still get pressure build-up.
So, how many have had a toothache? Let me see your hands, really. Wow, I have never had one of those. But I am a baby boomer so I have all the metal and everything going on. We didn’t have fluoride. Guys, I understand that hurts and as I mentioned a moment ago, the thing about a tooth which is much like a hoof, you’ve got this very rigid wall that actually sits in bone. Very similar, you’ve got these two hard structures with a very delicate tissue that separates the two structures and when this pulp gets inflamed for whatever reason and that tooth starts to swell inside there is pain. It is not sore. It pains and it can pain with every heartbeat in some situations. I have no reason, based on my medical training and, again, my colleagues may correct me or the horse people but I have no reason to believe that the internal areas of a horse’s hoof can become inflamed and they cannot feel an intense pain. So, let’s not fall victim of using that word soring so loosely and ruling it out without, well lets don’t become desensitized as to what we are talking about. It is beyond sore.
Have you ever had a tooth abscess? You know when we diagnose tooth abscesses, especially canine, like this tooth. Oftentimes on a radiograph all you see is a very faint area at the root of the tooth. Like I just saw a radiograph recently where normal eyes couldn’t even pick up a change yet there was a tooth abscess and this animal’s face was swollen up. Okay. So, again, it doesn’t take a whole lot and when folks say well we are just doing this or we are just doing that, you’ve got to translate that into the inside where there is no room for things to be pushed around and squeezed.
So, what does it really feel like? I think it feels like a combination of sensations and it depends on the animal. It depends on what has been done. It depends on a number of factors. But If I translate into human terms let’s start with this. This person has a burn. Now if she were to do a handstand she probably could get away with that. But any movement around that forearm where the skin gets stretched just a little bit what do you think she would feel? It would hurt, wouldn’t it. Now this can be days after the burn but until the body heals there is going to be an uncomfortable sensation. Well, caustic agents definitely cause a burning and stinging to occur. It is not just on the skin because how does the skin heal? The body has to bring these healing agents to the area. That is why you got this redness. That is why you have the swelling.
This person was out doing something I never would like to do and that is jogging I guess. But we probably have experienced a hurt ankle and you know there is a thing called a sore ankle and then there is a sprained ankle or something that his really painful. Somewhere in the mix I know these horses feel that. Why do I believe that? Because they have joints that extend right into the hoof itself, right? They are on that finger, their coffin bone is our third phalanx there and then you just go on up until you get into the pastern area. There are joints that operate there and they do flex when that horse walks normally. You get any inflammation in that joint and it may very well have the sensation of what a sprained ankle or a very painful ankle would feel like. This poor guy has a toothache and you already know what that feels like but I understand that when you get them it is constant. It won’t necessarily take time off. Now you can eat something to inflame it further but it is a constant pain. There are ligaments in the foot. There are ligaments and tendons that go down and some of you may have had tennis elbow or tendonitis. But when these structures get inflamed and they don’t swell up like a big old golf ball. It doesn’t take a whole lot but when they do get inflamed they hurt. And just a tiny amount of movement makes you hurt. I mean to the extent that the number one category for drugs sold in this country are what? Pain medication. So we got people running around who don’t like pain, which is understandable, and folks who will intentionally inflict that on an animal or another human being for gain is pretty sadistic.