A Conversation With...Breeder Leslie Carter

Leslie Carter, owner of Highland Farm in Little Rock, has plenty of experience breeding warmblood sport horses— she’s been doing it since 1984. In fact, one of her mares received the first artificial insemination in Arkansas (and all her foals have been conceived via AI). Carter, who has shown hunters, jumpers and eventers for years, says she began breeding warmbloods because she's couldn't find a top-quality warmblood here that she could afford. Now she's one of the few breeders in the region who specialize in breeding, raising and training warmbloods (she doesn't sell them until they're at least 3).
Over the years, Carter has produced a number of competitively successful warmbloods, several of which are offspring of Abdullah, the famous Olympic-champion show jumper. Nothing, however, prepared her for an especially difficult birth this summer. Her Dutch warmblood colt Val D'Isere was born with a rare dual problem: contracted front feet (even the knees were bowed) and severe weakness of the flexor-tendons on the back feet (known as extreme digital hyperextension). Editor Lisa Broadwater recently talked with Carter about the extraordinary measures she has taken to save Val D'Isere.

Horsemen's Roundup: Have you had difficult births before?
Leslie Carter: I’ve had stuff happen. But I’ve never had one presented incorrectly. This was first for that — this was my first for several things.

HR: Are you usually present for the births?
LC: Not always. I’m of the opinion that they have them out in the field. But I do have a foal alert sown in the mares. So when the foal begins to come out, it breaks a magnetic field in the foal alert, and the alarm goes off in the house.

HR: When did you know this foal was in trouble?
LC: The foal alert goes off at about three in the morning. My 12-year-old son and I go out there, and she’s in the pasture having it. And I go to look at it, and the nose is coming out first. Well, they’re supposed to come out front feet first like they’re diving with their heads between their legs. But the nose and the face is coming out.
So we get the mare up and take her to a significant hill; we’re hoping that gravity will help it to go back inside so I can look for the legs. Well, there wasn’t enough gravity on earth to help it; it was coming out.
So I called Dr. [Dan] Hanley and told him it wasn’t good, and he said he’d come out. I tried to shove the foal back, but at some point I realized that the front legs were bent and there was no way they were going to come out feet first. It crossed my mind that I was going to lose this mare or this baby; I was going to have to choose.
So all that’s going through my mind. I’m sitting there with this horse. She lays down, I reach my arms into her and hook them behind the knees of the baby and pull for all I’m worth, and she’s pushing for all she’s worth. Finally, he comes out.

HR: Was Dr. Hanley there?
LC: No, I called him back and said it’s out; never mind.

HR: You hadn’t seen the feet yet?
LC: No. I had no clue about the feet. But the poor mare was so exhausted and bruised. She could hardly get up for two or three days. Amazingly enough, she didn’t rip, though.
So she’s talking to it, and it’s talking to her. At some point, it tries to get up, and I’m looking at this thing and those legs are not right. I’ve had lots of babies with tendons that were over or weak, but he had contracted tendons in front and was loose to the point of total laxity, zero integrity, on the tendons behind.
I realize, this thing can’t stand up because it’s tipping over its front end and sitting down on its back end. There’s no way it's going in the same direction. I’m hoping it’s just weak behind at this point. They always come out of it, so I’m not just real worked up about it yet. So I put it in a wheelbarrow to get it up to the stall, rolled it up the hill and dumped it in the stall. Meanwhile, the mare decides she CAN get up and runs up there with it.
So I’m watching this thing, and it wants to stand up and nurse, and there’s no way it can stand up. So we help it stand up, and it just buckles continuously. It either buckles forward or falls backward; it can’t stand up.
I stayed out there and held it up for 20 minutes every three hours around the clock so it could nurse. It couldn’t stand up or lay down. You had to pick it up and lay it down, pick it up and lay it down. The feeding process became so casual after a while that you’d just pull up a chair, sit down and it would lay across your lap and reach up and nurse.

HR: Did you ever consider...
LC: Putting it down? I did think about that. Actually, Dr. Hanley came out and looked at it and said, “That’s really bad.” And he called all his contacts at the various vet schools, and everyone said, “Man, that’s a drag. You’ll probably have to put it down; there’s not much to be done about it when there’s zero integrity. It’s way past weakness; it’s birth defect.” He looked it up in all the books and stuff, and they would give it about a paragraph, saying “Now, this is a really bad situation.” And that would be it. There would be nothing to do about it.

HR: Because it’s too difficult to deal with?
LC: Right. It’s way labor intensive, and the results are possibly not going to worth it.

HR: Yeah, will it ever be a performance horse?
LC: If it gets full use of its tendons. What ended up happening was the tendons and ligaments were too long for the length of the cannon bone. Or you could say the bone was too short for the length of the tendons and ligaments.
Either way, the baby needed to grow about six inches to catch up with the excessive length of the tendons and ligaments.

HR: If it hadn’t been a top offspring, would you have considered putting it down?
LC: Not as long as it had a good attitude and was willing to keep trying. If it reached the point where its quality of life was not good… but it still was perky; it had no idea it wasn’t normal. It just had a great attitude.

HR: So part of your decision had to do with the horse itself?
LC: Right. The reason I didn’t put it down was that I wanted to try and do something with it. I couldn’t believe it was as bad as it was or that it would go on for as long as it did. But it was worse, and it has gone on forever.

HR: So you did feedings every three hours for how long?
LC: I had to go to Chicago later that week, so my husband — who isn’t a horse person — went out there and did the feedings while I was gone. So that baby eventually got stronger. He used up a lot of energy trying to nurse — he used up too much. He wasn’t thriving; he was barely holding his own nutritionally, with as much as he was expending. We probably held him up for a week or 10 days, until I got the bandages.

HR: Back up for a moment, to when you called all those vets.
LC: Most of them said, "You should put him down." The others said, "You could try braces, but he’ll get pressure sores." Sure enough, they were right. I had a friend, Steve Fisher, that does orthotics; he used to work for [Arkansas] Children’s Hospital. He has a lot of experience with braces. Nobody has any experience doing it for horses, so this was his first time too.
So Steve came out. He used a fiberglass casting material: He wrapped the baby's legs in fiberglass; it hardened and then cut he them off. He taped the fiberglass casts back together and then poured plaster in there and peeled off the mold and had a perfect replica of the baby’s legs. He did that for both back legs. And it looked really good.
Then he built braces out of heavy plastic with foam inside to protect as much as possible from the pressure soars, which were inevitable. He put Velcro around the outside. That made his legs stand up.

HR: It forced the tendon off the ground?
LC: We tried to make them so the heel of the foot would be flat on the ground. But the first set of braces had a little too much angle. We went with the normal horse of 45 degrees. Well, babies are not 45 degrees; they’re more like 60 degrees — much steeper. So we made a second set of braces.
That was good because then the column of support was much more upright and there was less pressure on his fetlocks and more pressure going straight down the cannon bone to the foot.

HR: So did the front feet straighten themselves out?
LC: No. Since the problems were opposite — the front contracted and the back totally slack — Dr. Hanley gave him two shots of tetracycline. Sure enough, the front feet came right down and looked great. However, tetracycline doesn’t specify only the front legs. So it worked on the back legs too, which were already way too relaxed. That delayed him coming up behind by probably 10 days or two weeks.
The whole time he’s in the stall with the mare; he’s not getting out.

HR: The braces went on when?
LC: After 10 days. It took me that long to realize that’s what I needed to do. It took four or five days to actually make them.

HR: Were there people who said it would correct naturally?
LC: No, there was absolutely no integrity. They flopped like clown feet. It was gross; it was painful to watch him walk on those ankles because they got bigger and bigger. One of them got sprained, essentially; it couldn’t take the weight and the turning.
Before the braces, I cut tube socks and basically duct-taped them on so they’d stay in position to keep him from rubbing those ankles; his fetlocks were getting rubbed raw. And he's in deep shavings, but they just couldn’t handle the abrasion.
Before the braces came, I got sheet cotton and VetRap and made that as tight as I could. And for a while, it held them in a fairly good position. But of course the longer he walked, the more pressure there was. But in the standing bandages, which were really tight, he could stand to nurse.

HR: Did he resist at all?
LC: No. By then, though, he had sprained one of his ankles and wasn’t willing to even set that down, so he’d hop on that one weak back leg, driving it worse into the ground than it already was. So I put a sweat on the sprained one to try to get it down. And that worked. Within 24 hours, the swelling was gone.
When the braces finally came, they didn’t quite fit on that leg anymore. So that’s where the pressure sores came because now the ankle part in the brace was too big. I tried to wrap it with something to take up that slack, but that put even more pressure on it. We knew we had to make new braces, so we did.

HR: So was he able to go out and run around?
LC: Yeah, I turned him out in the pasture, and he went down to the bottom of the hill with his mother. Before that, I turned him out in the front with his VetRap bandages; that worked for a while fairly good.
He didn’t go very far. But when I put the real braces on, he went all the way to the bottom of the hill of the big pasture, which is a long ways when you’ve got wheels for the first time. But it did make him tired.
The argument has always been, do you keep them in and preserve their energy, or let them out where they can move around and strengthen? For years, I’ve been in the middle of the debate. If they’re contracted, you leave them in. If they’re weak, you turn them out. Well, this horse had both.
And if they have zero integrity, a lot of people would have said leave him in totally because he’s not going to strengthen anything; he doesn’t have anything to stand on. But the braces were supporting and taking a lot of that weight. And he could get up and down with them.

HR: Were they on 24 hours day?
LC: No. He could only have them off when he was laying down. But we couldn’t stand out there 24 hours a day, waiting for him to lay down. And babies get up and lay down all the time; so that wasn’t going to work. I left them on for three hours and took them off for three hours, regardless of what he was doing. We were feeding him anyway, so that wasn’t so bad. But he could get up by himself and balance long enough with the braces on to feed himself, so that was a major turning point in the extreme care we were having to give him.

HR: It’s been five weeks. Where are you now?
LC: We’re only occasionally using the braces. He’s off the ground maybe two or three inches. If you had a foal born like he is now, you’d say, “That’s a foal born with weakness; it’ll straighten itself out in time.”
The braces came off about a week ago. Until recently, I continued to have the support wraps. If I had to be gone for a period of time and the braces wouldn’t be put on, he had the cotton VetRaps as tight as I could get them on.

HR: How has his mom dealt with it?
LC: She has been very quiet about it. She knows there’s something wrong, and she’s a little overprotective. But she’s overprotective of her babies in general. And of course she was so bruised up herself. She was in the stall for a week before she was ready to get out.
By then I was ready to let that baby walk around a little bit. I’d let them out for about an hour. She’d walk him down to the bottom of the hill; he’d have this horrible jerking, hop-along, drag-it gait. But he didn’t know that wasn’t okay. He just kept going. He’d lay down when he got tired and get up and go when he wanted to. He enjoyed getting out, and I think psychologically that was a huge component for him maintaining the great attitude he’s had. He was stimulated.

HR: Did anyone say you were crazy for doing this?
LC: Originally, there were people who said, “You need to think about putting him down.” Then they’d see him getting around. Although it was kind of painful to watch, you had to admit this foal found a way. He didn’t act like it hurt him, and attitude-wise, he was fine with it all.
There was a vet I contacted in Keller, Texas — Steve Long. There had been a giraffe born at the Dallas Zoo last year with this same problem. Steve had worked on him, and he told me some of the things he had done; he used cruder braces than I had available, because I had a friend who built braces. And the giraffe is great today; it’s totally normal. Of all the vets I talked to about this, he was the most encouraging. He said, “You can do this. You’ve got to be dedicated, but you can do this.”
I knew about him because there was a clinic here with Kim Vinoski, and one of the people in it was from Dallas and told me about him.

HR: Did you basically rely on your instincts in dealing with this?
LC: Yes. But Dr. Hanley has been great. He researched as much as he could to find out what we should do. He helped with the bandaging initially and suggested the support wraps. The vet in Texas who was encouraging.
Now he’s out there running around in the ring. He's still very weak behind, but he runs as fast as any other baby. It looks a little funny because he still kind of rabbit hops in the back; he doesn’t have the strength to do all the stuff he’s trying to do. The back has come up two to three inches. And he still has a great attitude

HR: When did you start to think he was out of the woods?
LC: When I saw the ankles come up. I’ve been traveling a lot, so I go away for a time, and other people will take up the slack for me — thank heaven for friends and family. Every time I came back, I had a fresh view. And it would look a little better and a little better.
It dramatically got better in the last two weeks, to the point where those ankles never touch the ground anymore. He still walks on the ball of his heel and rocks forward. A lot of times, though, I do see him standing totally flat on his feet. That’s so huge. I thought that day would never come.

HR: What do you do now?
LC: The braces are off, and there are no more support wraps. The skin is heeling, and I’ll let him exercise and get stronger. I’m hoping that in two or three months, he’ll be fairly normal. He needs to grow quite a bit in those cannon bones to take up the slack in the tendons and ligaments. By the time he’s 6 months old, he will have grown enough to take up the slack and will have exercised enough to strengthen it while he’s growing. He needs to move around for the bones to grow; you need that compression to stimulate the growth plates.

HR: Will you continue to use that mare as a brood mare?
LC: Yeah. I don’t find the fault with her. We looked at how that might have happened. She’s had plenty of other foals. Some of the literature says it could be nutrition-related. Well, they’re all getting the same thing to eat here, and they’re all well-fed. And nobody else had a problem. So it likely was not that.
There’s another school of thought that says it relates to their position in the womb while they’re developing. What can you do about that?
HR: It doesn’t make you nervous to breed her again?
LC: You know, if you aren’t a risk taker, you should never get into breeding. Because there’s always something. Everything about this is risky.