Otter is a 16.2 hand 2004 Kentucky bred TB out of Drax Hall by Marquetry (pedigree). Two of his race videos can be found here and here. I bought him in October 2011 off of the Canter Mid-Atlantic Mountaineer track trainer listings.
I fell in love with his puppy dog personality. Unfortunately as we were starting his retraining, he kept coming up sore - not enough to definitively say he was lame, but definitively NQR, so I had the vet out in early January 2012. Some blocks and lots of xrays later, we found an older incomplete hairline fracture in his right hind fetlock that was never let heal. My vet suspected that the fracture itself wasn't bothering him, but that the suspensory ligament was getting irritated by the fracture site. We put him on a series of adequan and put him on stall rest for 3 months to let the fracture heal and let the suspensory calm down.
Luckily he recovered well, and we started rehabbing (and retraining) in April 2012. However,at the end of June 2012, my klutzy horse managed to injure his other hind leg (the events of how remain a mystery - my previous barn swears he was fine, and I got there that day to pull him out of his stall 3 legged lame). After another call to the vet, and more xrays, we discovered that he had another incomplete fracture of the left hind fetlock. We started on stall rest again, but his leg kept getting more tender and feeling hot to the touch. I put a call into the vet and she was suppose to come out the next day, but the next morning, Otter was flat out in his stall and fairly non-responsive when the barn help tried to get him to stand up. When the vet got out there and started looking at his leg, a gush of pus came out from near the fracture site. It seems that however he injured himself, something (sliver of wood, perhaps) got into his skin and created an infection which went systematic - hence his behavior. Some systematic antibiotics, draining the other abscess tract, and banamine, and he started on the mend again.
Otter must have a guardian angel, because he eventually recovered well from his second incident, although he gave me several gray hairs in the process. After several issues at that barn, I moved him to a new barn in December 2012, and finally was able to start seeing if Otter would become an event horse. Because of starting and stopping his training several times, we had to start from scratch with him, but it was worth it when I was able to take him to his first show in August 2013 where we placed 4th in an unrecognized horse trial in the beginner novice horse division. The rest of the story is on the blog.
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