If you read yesterday's diary, you will know that just as Patsy and I found our feet again, she showed the first signs of laminitis on Friday morning. She is on what I have taken to calling box arrest, our own little version of lockdown, no grass and a very carefully controlled diet, and she is being watched like a hawk. While she serves her time, I have fallen headlong down a rabbit hole trying to understand how on earth we got here. What I found genuinely surprised me, so I want to share it, in case it helps you see the same trap coming.
This one stings a little, if I am honest, because laminitis and I are not strangers. I grew up in the showing world, Welsh Section B ponies in particular (a story for another day), and if you know natives, you will know how dreadfully susceptible they can be to it. So I have spent a good part of my life learning how to keep it at bay, and I would never have called myself a novice. And yet. Our paddocks right now look less like lush green pasture and more like a desert. I had been out inspecting the fields regularly, hunting for any sign of life in the grass, and honestly, forget signs of life, most days all I could see was dust. So when I tell you I was genuinely shocked, I mean it, and I have well and truly learned a lesson or two.
The Grass That Looks Innocent
Here is the bit I did not know. When grass is stressed by a long, dry spell, it does not simply stop and wait. On sunny days it keeps making sugar through photosynthesis, but with no water it cannot actually grow and spend that sugar, so it stores it instead. All those weeks of parched, short, tired-looking grass had quietly been stockpiling sugar in the base of every blade. Short and brown does not mean safe. That was my first surprise: the very grass I had written off as too sparse to bother about was possibly the most sugary of the lot.
Then The Rain Came
Then, after weeks of nothing, we finally had three solid days of rain. And here I have to hold my hand up, because I had assumed the danger would arrive with a big green flush, and that as long as the fields stayed bare we were safe. I was wrong on both counts. Nothing turned green. Our paddocks went from dry dust to wet, muddy dust, without a single blade of green in sight, and yet here we are.
That is the part I really want you to take away, because it caught me completely off guard. The sugar was never about how green things looked. Grasses stash a great deal of their sugar in the bottom few inches of the plant, so a grazed-down, dusty paddock is often exposing the sweetest part of all, and drought-stressed grass can hold two or three times the sugar of grass that is growing happily. Then the rain arrives, and even without a scrap of visible green, it kick-starts fast regrowth in that short, stressed grass, and that new growth runs on stored sugar. So the risk turns up quietly, in a paddock that still looks like a dust bowl. No lush green flush required. My own vet suspected exactly this: the stressed grass after the rain, and the simple, humbling fact that we cannot always see what is quietly reappearing in a bare paddock until it is too late.
A visible spring or autumn flush is a real and well-known danger, and absolutely worth caution. But my hard-won lesson was the sneakier one: you do not need to see green to be at risk.
Why Sugar And Hooves Don't Mix
So why would a sugar surge threaten the feet, of all places? There seem to be two main routes, and they can overlap. The first is in the gut: a big load of rapidly fermentable sugar can tip the delicate balance of the hindgut, and the knock-on effects can reach all the way down to the sensitive laminae that hold the pedal bone in place inside the hoof. The second, and the one researchers now point to most, is insulin. High-sugar grass drives blood insulin up, and high insulin is very strongly linked to laminitis. Ponies, good-doers, and horses with conditions like EMS or Cushing's (PPID) are especially vulnerable, but here is the sobering part: even a perfectly healthy horse can produce a surprising amount of insulin when the grass is very sugary.
The Signs I Wish I'd Known Sooner
Laminitis can come on faster than you would expect, so knowing the early signs really matters. The things to look for include a pottery, careful, walking-on-eggshells way of going, especially on hard ground or when turning; reluctance to walk forward; standing rocked back onto the heels to take the weight off the toes; heat in the feet; a stronger than usual digital pulse; lying down far more than normal; and that vague sense that something is just not quite right. If you notice any of it, get your horse off the grass and onto a soft surface, and phone your vet straight away. This really is one of those things where hours count, and acting quickly can make a genuine difference.
As for preventing it, that is a proper conversation to have with your own vet, because so much depends on the individual horse. But the themes I keep meeting are the same ones: take extra care in spring and autumn, and after rain on drought; know that grass sugars tend to run highest from late afternoon into the evening and lowest in the early morning; and understand that for some horses, restricted grazing, a track system, a grazing muzzle, or time off the grass altogether are all tools worth talking through.
Short grass is not the same as safe grass. That is the sentence I will not be forgetting.
If you would like the softer, more personal side of this rotten week, it is in yesterday's diary, Patsy: Back On Board.
We are taking it one quiet day at a time, everything crossed, and doing exactly what our vet tells us. If this saves even one horse a sore and frightening week, then Patsy's bad luck will have been worth something.