Horse Care: Dealing With Eye Injuries
Today I wanted to share with you some information about my horse’s eye injury. He had poked his eye on something, probably a piece of wire and it caused an ulcer on his eye. My thought was I have two different types of ophthalmic ointment that I used in the past on a horse and maybe I could use one of them.
I read about the two different ointments on the internet to see what I could find about each of these since they had different ingredients. After some research and thought I figured it best to just call the veterinarian and see what he thought about using either of these ointments. I called the veterinarian and he said the ointments both have antibiotics in them which was good. If that would have been all they had in them I probably could have used them, but you always need to check with your veterinarian first.
One of the ointments had a steroid in it and if I would have used that one with the steroid it would have caused the ulcer in the eye to get worse. Here’s the deal with a horses eye when they have an injury the veterinarian said the iris clamps down and starts causing scar tissue which could cause them to go blind. So anytime your horse has an eye injury you are better off calling the veterinarian because an eye is so sensitive and you don’t want to mess around with it.
Don’t think because you have some old eye ointments you can go ahead and use them it’s best to check with your vet even if you used them in the past on one of your other horse’s. Every eye injury is different and I know you would hate to have your horse go blind or lose an eye or have it get so infected you have to put your horse down.
So did you know this about the horses iris when it gets injured?