How to Train Your Dragon

Hoof abscesses and iodine - large black animal with hind end/tail dysfunction appreciates some help

Lesson 1: Don’t smack the dragon! Yes, I know he is biting at you, but smacking him on the face is just going to make him think you want to play the biting game.

Lesson 2: The dragon likes treats, and will do stuff for you to get them.

Lesson 3: The dragon has a lot of pain in his body, and appreciates some bodywork to help him feel better. It’s a little tricky, because if you try to touch him where he is hurting, he will bite at you to tell you about it.

The dragon was at first a baby Percheron, a yearling. A yearling Percheron appears to be the same shape as a full grown Friesian, a fancy knight’s charger. When he stretches out on the grass in the sun, he is completely flat, like a cardboard horse. He likes to have you sing him a lullaby, and peeks out from under his great dragon eyelashes, then goes back to snoring softly. Now that he is six, when he lies down in the grass he is a major landscape feature. When he is standing up, he is six feet high at the shoulder (18 hands). Now that he is grown up, he seems to have made a decision to try to cooperate with us humans, as long as we make reasonable requests.

One of the reasonable requests we make, every four or five weeks, is for him get his feet positioned for his farrier to trim them. His farrier is infinitely kind and patient, and has a great sense of humor. Neither his farrier or myself can actually hold up his hind feet, due to his hind end dysfunction, and the fact that neither of us is Hercules. Whenever I can get Hercules to hold up the dragon’s hind feet for him the dragon is pretty grateful, but I haven’t yet found the treats that work on Hercules… Anyway, our workaround is for the dragon to place his foot on a small block of wood, so the part of the foot hanging off the edge of the block of wood can be trimmed.

This works better if we do some warm-up exercises first, to get his brain to connect with his back feet. One of these is called “straddle the pole”. Lay a 12 foot long heavy pole on the ground, and get the horse to walk along the length of the pole, right feet staying to the right side of the pole, left feet to the left side. We were all pretty excited when he learned this, and he was excited as well. Whenever I lay a pole on the ground he perks up, all excited to show off his skill.

Caring for the dragon is complicated and provides me with plenty of stuff to keep my few remaining brain cells busy. One of the continuing puzzles in dragon care is how to prevent hoof abscesses, especially in those back feet that I can’t normally hold up long enough to take care of properly. I was hoping that dietary iodine (at about 18 mg/day, or 9 mg/1,000 lbs bodyweight, as part of the seaweed based hoof supplement “Focus HF” by Source) would prevent abscesses. So I was disappointed when this year he had a short-lived abscess in right back hoof. It resolved pretty quickly, in less than a week. Which left me with a few questions.

Did the iodine help his immune system take care of the abscess relatively quickly, compared to maybe 2 weeks to resolve an abscess without it?

Would a higher dose, like the straight-up iodine from EquinePlus Feed (https://equineplusfeed.com/supplements/organic-iodine.html) I used to cure his sarcoid, actually prevent abscesses?

Or is the iodine completely irrelevant here?

I am soliciting comments, opinions, and especially reports from people about their experience with horses, hoof abscesses, and iodine.

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