A Little First Aid
By Joanne M. Friedman
So far we’ve focused primarily on cleaning equipment, but that’s not the only place where cross-over home products are handy.
From my own experience, many human products are more than successful and far less expensive than their veterinary counterparts. They’re easier to come by, as well. Everyone knows of an all-night drugstore or supermarket, but tack shops and farm-supply stores tend to keep regular hours, so aren’t open when you most need them—like when Fuzzbutt comes in from a night of pasture carousing with a twinkle in his eye and a gash on his leg.
These will help:
Johnson & Johnson nursing pads
He’ll soon get over the embarrassment when Zips Moneypit realizes how comfy these are on his hock, knee, or ankle joint. These highly absorbent oval pads are made to fit a nursing mother’s breasts and cupped to be invisible under a bra. As a result they fit a curved area far better than any non-sterile gauze pad you’ll find anywhere. If you need to bandage something quickly while you wait for the vet, or if it’s a minor wound that doesn’t require more specialized padding such as surgical sponges, at $3.99 for 36 of them, these nursing pads are perfect. They will hold a good slather of any ointment and are very easy to wrap over with vet wrap as they don’t need to bunch up to fit the curves.
Bacitracin or triple antibiotic ointment
The generic brands of this product are cheap enough to make this a must-have for any horse owner. Even the most minor cut can become infected in the open septic system of a paddock or stall. Just a dab of ointment will help tremendously to prevent that. Clean the wound first with hydrogen peroxide poured on or squirted on with a catheter syringe or turkey baster, rinse with cold water, then gob on a bit of ointment and cover with a nursing pad.
For big, open wounds you’ll want something more meaningful that will probably require a vet visit, but for the minor scrapes and pokes of which horses are so fond, this stuff is just great. And you can use it on yourself as well when you scrape your hand on that rough board or the nail that’s protruding from Fuzzy’s loose shoe. A smear of ointment and a band-aid (or a small strip of vet wrap with a bit of gauze), and you’re good to go.
One horse forum poster gave me this recipe: Mix equal parts of Desitin, triple antibiotic, hyrdrocortisone ointment, and athlete’s foot crème, and you’ve got a cure for scratches or mud fever (those icky spots on the back of the pastern that form during mud season.
Hydrogen peroxide
If you don’t have quarts of this in your barn, you’re missing something. It doesn’t keep forever, so don’t buy a case and salt it away, but a couple of big bottles of the supermarket brand will run you under $2.00 in most places. As noted above, you can clean and cauterize wounds with it, but it’s also useful for sterilizing anything you intend to use around those wounds. I keep a bottle on the shelf in the tack room, and each time I un-tack, I wipe the bit clean with a washcloth doused in peroxide. Peroxide is completely non-toxic, so you can use it for almost any purpose. Paired with baking soda, it’s a fabulous cleaner for metal parts of anything. Just mix the two in a bucket of warm water (it will foam, so don’t over fill the bucket) and drop in your bit collection or whatever else is gathering grime.
I’ve read that peroxide is great for keeping the algae population down in your troughs. I tried this, however, and found that the amount needed to kill algae in a 100-gallon trough was more than I had on hand. For buckets, however, it will do just fine. Experiment to find the smallest amount needed to get the job done.
Turkey baster
As noted, this is a fine replacement for a catheter syringe for most purposes. Not that the syringes are expensive, but if you didn’t plan on having to squirt something into your horse on that particular day, you might not have any on hand. A quick trip to any discount store will net you a baster that will not only do the job, but which can be thoroughly cleaned for re-use.
Use it for peroxide applications, gentle iodine washes, or for adding liquid supplements to feed. If you can find one that is calibrated so that you can actually measure the liquid, so much the better. If not, do the measuring beforehand by using one of the little plastic measuring cups that come with some human cough medicines. Keep a collection of those in the barn. They’re almost as handy as the baster.
Preparation H
Last on today’s list, Preparation H, the hemorrhoid ointment, is great, I’m told, for shoe boils and scars. I haven’t tried it on either of those, but I do know it will help reduce minor swellings from insect bites and the like.
Rumor also has it that a little dabbed on those foal-watch bags under your eyes will shrink them right up. I’m not going to test that one, but feel free to experiment as you see fit.
