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When I bought my Welsh mare I was told that the lump in her crest just
above the withers was a cyst, until I moved here. I happened to ask my equine
dentist (DVM - but now he does only dentistry) about it and he told me that it
was the top part of one of her vertebrae. The piece actually pops in and out
of where it should be if it were still connected.
In this case, there are two possible reasons for what happened:
a. She ran under something too low and snapped it off.
b. Someone hit her (unfortunately, given her past, this is more likely).
It's an old injury, it was healed when her previous owner bought her,
which is when I first met her. It hasn't affected her at all, she's never
shown
any signs of pain and even competed on the A circuit in Small Pony Hunters
before I bought her.
Another case was a TB I knew who, in his "younger" years, flipped over
backwards in the crossties when someone scared him (I think he was cribbing and
they ran at him with a whip [not smart with a former racehorse with a well
known phobia of whips]).
I don't know which vertebrae were broken, but I do know that at the time
everyone thought it was *very* serious. I believe he got about six months off
before starting back working.
I met him years later and wouldn't have ever guessed he'd broken his
neck, he was actually quite a good dressage horse and was jumped regularly,
granted the fences were rarely above 2' high.
Jamie
In the Mountains SW of Denver, CO
