‘The trailer looked like an abbatoir’: owner’s electric fence warning after horse cuts artery

The owner of a Connemara who racked up a +£3,000 vet’s bill by getting himself tangled in electric fencing has spoken up to alert others to the possible dangers.

Catherine Arden’s 23-year-old gelding Charlie cut an artery and spent 10 days in hospital as the wound, which went down to the bone, had to be thoroughly cleaned and treated.

Catherine told H&H one of the liveries at her yard in Lincolnshire texted her to say Charlie had gone through the fence and fallen over.

“I looked out of the window and could see his tail was covered in blood,” she said. “There’s a French and Saunders scene where she cuts her finger off and it’s spurting blood everywhere – it was like that. It was horrendous.”

Catherine said her vet was “quite relaxed” about Charlie’s prognosis.

“She used to work at an equestrian blood bank and said they could stand and bleed like that for up to an hour with no ill effects – but it had an effect on me!” she said.

“I think he’d pushed his way through the fence and got his leg caught in the lower strand. The initial injury didn’t look too bad but it was down to the bone so they had to open it up and really clean it, and that had to be done at the clinic, it was like an episode of Casualty; by the time we arrived at the vets the bandage had slipped and the trailer looked like an abattoir.”

Catherine said Charlie has form as an escape artist, so she had used the rope-style fencing, rather than the flat tape, as advised by her vet to minimise risk of injury. She had only fenced off a boggy part of the field, with two strands of rope both attached to the battery, and Charlie had been left with a pile of haylage.

Warning: graphic image

“I was being a responsible owner!” she said. “It was a new system, and knowing how determined he is, we connected a separate battery for each strand, all the way round. He’d had a few days with his rug off when it was warm, then maybe having one back on gave him the confidence to go through it.”

Catherine was due to collect Charlie from the vets on 21 March, and he will need another month’s box rest to heal, including home vet visits to monitor the healing and change bandages. She said the total cost of his escapade will be about £3,500.

“You don’t think of electric fencing as being able to do that,” she said. “The vet said if it had been any closer to his hock joint, it could have caused permanent tendon damage. They mentioned that a thicker electric rope causes less damage than the typical white tape, and also that the very thin electric fence string can cut in like cheese wire round their legs so that’s worth knowing to avoid.

“They also told me that any injury that goes right down to the bone causes a disruption to blood supply which may ultimately lead to that bone progressively dying off, but this might not be apparent until up to 10 days after the accident. Hence plenty of intravenous and ongoing oral antibiotics to avoid a non healing wound”.

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