Colic in horses

Every horse owner or rider has surely heard of colic at some point. What's more, when colic comes up, the words that usually follow are "injection", "vet", "droppings"… Colic is one of the most feared conditions in the equestrian world. It strikes fear into everyone, in fact. So what exactly is colic?

What is colic?

Colic is a term covering a set of symptoms that point to intestinal pain, or indeed abdominal pain in the broadest sense. So colic can be understood quite simply as "stomach ache". It is therefore a very broad word that can cover a great many conditions.

In the horse, however, most colic symptoms relate to digestive problems, which are generally linked to a slowing down or even a complete stop in gut transit. As colic is a health matter, even if you buy the very best accessories from La Sellerie Française for your horse, you will need to do everything you can to cure the problem before your horse can enjoy them.

The horse's digestive system is made up, among other things, of a very small stomach holding around 15 litres, a small intestine of more than 20 metres, a caecum that acts as a reservoir of roughly 40 litres, and a colon some 7 metres long.

You can see, then, that the horse's digestive tract is long enough to suffer plenty of breakdowns. To picture it easily, colic in the horse can be thought of as a plumbing problem. It is a network of very long pipes of differing diameters, mostly flexible and mobile within the abdomen, with fluid circulating through them.

What goes wrong when a horse has colic?

When colic occurs, the conditions most commonly seen in the horse can vary. It may, for example, be a blockage. Here the plumbing works properly and is even in its normal position. The problem comes from the contents instead. Those contents are not liquid enough, so they stop moving along. This generally happens at the level of the colon, where the contents of the digestive tract are thickest and the intestine naturally bends.

From that moment on, transit stops and droppings build up to form a blockage. This problem can be treated fairly easily. All it takes is laxatives such as paraffin oil, given regularly.

Colic can also be caused by a displacement. Again, it starts with heavy contents. But instead of merely slowing transit as with a blockage, the pipe is dragged by the weight. The contents shift the pipe and trap it somewhere else.

As a result, the contents of the pipe may circulate poorly and transit is blocked. Fortunately it is possible to get things moving again with fluids or paraffin. Even so, surgery is sometimes needed to put everything back in order.

Colic can also arise when the small intestine is obstructed by strangulation or twisting. Here the intestine knots on itself, or around another organ, like a tangled hosepipe. This type of colic can be more painful than the previous ones. Colic may also be due to a twisted colon. This is in fact the most serious form of colic.