We have posted a customer response by Ellen Jefferies that we found very useful. It was shown to Dr. Reggie Tschorn, an Equine Vet, whose comment was that Ellen really did her homework.

“In your Mar 23rd newsletter Horse Keeping Hints column, you recommend hosing mud off legs and leaving them to air dry, or drying with a towel.  You also recommend keeping the fetlock hair trimmed.

Here in OH, we have world championship mud 3/4 of the year and with the mud comes cold temps, which I know you have too.  We fox hunt with our horses in pretty toxic country (seems to be well contaminated with bacteria and fungus). The horses, come in with mud to their bellies, or higher after a hunt  Scratches can be a big, big problem and for us have developed into a full blown, and nearly fatal case of cellulitis.

Our experience – learned the hard way –  has been this.  The best way to avoid scratches is to not trim the hair on the legs and to not hose mud off the legs after the hunt.  Instead, we leave the hair to protect the legs against being scratched by the brush we have to ride thru, giving bacteria and fungus an entry point.  And we put the dirty horse in a stall with a wool cooler to dry; once the mud is dry, we brush it out with a fairly soft brush or vacumn it out.  Doing it this way leaves the skin unbroken and dry, and usually without a spec of mud touching it.  Most of the time, even if we’ve been riding thru water, the water doesn’t wet the hair all the way to the skin.  We found that hosing the horse after work left the legs wet to the sking and taking long enough to dry out that the skin became chapped the skin, which again led to infections.

If we do end up with breaks in the skin on the legs (scratches or worse), we immediately do clip leaving about 1/4″ of hair up to the knees/hocks.  We do hose mud off, sponge with betadine solution, and blow dry the legs with an ionic hair dryer (works real fast) een tho blow drying a horses legs is a real pain.  After the legs are dry, depending on the state of the infection, we use either panalog ointment if we have serious inflamation and swelling (cellulitis) or if you don’t have swelling, a mixture of DMSO, furazone (antibacterial), and one of the fenbendazole wormers  (an antifungal) in equal parts.  I assume you can substitute a different antibacterial if you don’t want to use furazone.

We had a “gray” draft cross with lots of pink skin.  We almost lost him to cellulitis.  It took 9 months to clear up the infection, all of which was the result of hosing his legs after hunts.  It didn’t help that we went thru every treatment 6 different vets could think of without finding success, until we finally used one that recommended panalog.  Our experience with him, and a lot of trial and error, is what led to the procedure we use.

The DMSO concoction is one I first saw in an article on scratches in Chronicle of the Horse.  It cures everything fast, from scratches to rain rot to girth itch to ring worm”