Tick Paralysis

I learned about a horse illness I had never heard of this week - tick paralysis. Strikes horses, cattle and dogs. It can be caused by a single tick getting itself attached to your animal. If the tick happens to have a particularly nasty poison in its system, one tick can poison a horse all by itself - cause paralysis and loss of motor function. If it is not caught and treated in time, the paralysis will stop the breathing or the heart and the animal will die.

I looked out into my pasture one evening this week. One of the yearlings was laying down. Would have thought nothing of it (they lay down all the time), except that I happen to look out as he was struggling to rise. And it was immediately apparent that something was wrong.

He looked like a new-born foal trying to get up. He would get two feet under him, then flop over before he could get the others where he wanted them. I rushed out there, expecting to find a leg injury of some sort, but there was nothing obviously wrong. Except that he was also clearly not right. He looked dazed and nothing I did seemed to allow him to get his legs under him long enough to stand.

I put in a call to the vet and then sent my mom to get some neighbors. I still assumed it was a leg injury and that we would have to find some way to get him out of this pasture and into a vet clinic for ex rays and treatment. Of course, he was in the most remote pasture we've got, in a spot that required crossing at least three creeks to get to. There would be no getting a truck out to him. My only thought was to round up enough of my neighbors that we could carry him out - all 500-600 lbs of him.

My neighbors responded immediately and came to help. At one point we had five adults and 4 kids out there in the field with him. He was shaking and his breathing was ragged, so we ran to the house for blankets. Stripped a half dozen blankets off my bed and had all the kids carry them out to him while I mixed up some mare's milk replacer, and vitamins and put it all in a bottle.

I got back out there to find him covered in blankets and surrounded by people who were talking to him and petting him and generally fussing all over him. He had stopped shaking and now he just looked weak. His eyes weren't quite so glazed. I had the kids help me feed him from the bottle I had mixed up and as his strength began to come back, I sent them to the barn for a bucket of straight grain. Soon he was gobbling that up as quickly as we could give it to him. The kids held handfuls of it next to his mouth (he still couldn't sit up normally, so we fed him on his side) and he ate the whole bucket.

We managed to get him up at one point and it was clear he was not at all able to walk. It was as if he couldn't figure out which was was up - he just wobbled and fell over. It was about then that I started to realize it wasn't a leg injury - that it looked a lot more like poison. Something was affecting his brain or his motor skills. But I had no idea what could do this to him. We keep our fields well free of poisonous plants and there is nothing else around that I knew of that could cause this kind of reaction in a horse.

The vet got there right as we were debating the best way to carry a 500 lb animal over three creeks and 20 acres of marshy land to get him somewhere safe. I met her as she walked across the field and told her I was suspecting that this was not a leg injury at all, but some sort of poison. She said that what I described sounded like classic tick paralysis.

I had never heard of that. It only takes one tick, she explained. If the tick has something in its system that is bad enough to poison the horse, it can kill it. The only way to reverse the problem is to remove the tick.

Of course, searching for a tick on an animal that big isn't always easy. But then, that wasn't what she did. She just gave him a shot of Ivermectin - the same thing we use ever few months to worm our horses with, but in a more quick acting form. She said it could take up to 12 hours, but often it worked in 15 minutes. We stood around and waited. 15 minutes later, our little guy shook himself and stood up. A few false starts and he managed it. He was wobbling, but clearly vastly improved. We spent a half hour out there making sure he could walk. And we went around and treated all the other horses with Ivermectin just to be safe. I watched him for most of the evening and, while he clearly didn't stand or walk normally, he did stand and he did walk.

Its been about four days since then and he is still a little shaky. Apparently it takes a while for all the swelling to go down and his spine to return to normal. I have him in a smaller pasture so I can keep a closer eye on him and I spend some time with him every day, just fussing over him and making sure he is still improving. Most likely he will recover completely and be none the worse for wear. And I am reading everything I can about this odd illness which I had never heard of before.