I’ve been blessed throughout my riding career with very few injuries to my horses. But this summer my riding and show plans were ended by an injury that my horse managed to get while on turnout in a group.

My horse, Bogart, is a 16-year-old Dutch warmblood, a former jumper who has been doing low level dressage work with me for seven years. As soon as I brought him in that day, I knew something was wrong. He wasn’t tracking up at the walk, and there was the swelling at the back of his right hind leg that ran halfway down the cannon and around the fetlock joint. The vet came and did a lameness exam, flexion tests, ultrasound and X-ray. Bogart was diagnosed with a small tear to the suspensory branch. He was classified as a 4 out of 5 on the lameness scale, which means “lameness is obvious at a walk.”

Given my lack of experience with such injuries, I did what many horse owners would do – I panicked. But the treating veterinarian was patient and explained in more detail what I was dealing with. In the interests of this article, I’ve chosen to publish Bogart’s ultrasound images in order to clearly illustrate what the injury is.

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