Strangles at Hill Livery

Autumn 2025

So here we are in the autumn of 2025, and what a year it has been so far.  We have had so

me amazing times, and we have had the lowest of lows. 

We were having a great summer, lots of activity, smiles, laughter and sharing of all things horsey, then July 2025 and we have a horse come in from the field with a strange lump on his face, our brilliant head girl Georgia noticed it and immediately brought it to my attention.  The vet was called, and it was first thought that it may be an insect bite, but 3 days later after requesting a guttural pouch wash, strangles was confirmed!  This is one of the worst things anyone with a horse wants to hear. 

Strangles is a highly infectious bacterial infection.

The yard went into immediate lock down and strict bio security protocols put in place, foot dips everywhere, carpet soaked in disinfectant to walk on as well, in case anyone forgot to dip their feet, and for the dogs and horses to walk over.  Sprayers for car tires, gate handles, stable doors, walls and anything else that could or needed to be sprayed. 

I informed all the livery owners, and professionals that service the yard.  Transparency is vital with any contagious disease, and so often it is kept hush hush, which is not very helpful, but totally understandable when you are treated like a leper!  Then I decided to take to social media, to inform everyone and keep everyone safe, I did not expect it to blow up the way it did.  It seemed I was educating people, I am not a vet, I have no medical training, but years of experience and a practical outlook on life.  I am neurodiverse so I do a lot of out of the box thinking! This blog is purely my perspective and may not be medically 100% correct but it is real life.

There seems to be 2 ways of dealing with strangles, the traffic light system, where you pull infected horses or horses showing symptoms and keep them away from the others, or the chicken pox party system, where you keep them all together to get it and get over it together.  Now we did not have enough separate isolated fields to do the traffic light system, this is the reality of having a medium sized yard and already looking after some special cases, we have a horse that previously before coming to us, suffered badly with laminitis so she was kept on minimal grazing, we had a mare and foal who were on their own, we have 2 mares and 2 donkeys that live together, then we have the single sex groups.   All our fields back onto each other and the horses can chat over the gates, we did manage to have one paddock we could keep empty to separate the mares away from the geldings and the 2 mares and donkeys so we did have separate groups but could not separate the individuals’ showing symptoms.  This was our situation and what we had to deal with, not everyone liked it!  And yes one owner exited stage left with 1 hours’ notice and no discussion, these things happen.  People do strange things when they are scared.  I cannot say it was an ideal situation, but to be honest having strangles is not ideal full stop. 

The symptoms vary, and when you say classic symptoms, we didn’t seem to have anything classic!  The first horse had strange lumps not in the normal place, but then he did have 3 abscesses burst out in his lower jaw.  We had 4 horses with external abscesses, 3 had it in their head, and one had bastard strangles.  Now I’m not swearing when I say bastard strangles, this is a real thing!  It is strangles that presents itself in any way outside of the respiratory tract.  In our case, our boy had it in his anus and under his tail, this was not great but in the grand scheme of bastard strangles, we could see the abscesses and treat them, in some cases these abscesses are on internal organs and are fatal.   

All the horses were having their temperatures taken every day, most days twice a day, to check for the first signs, which is a spike in temperature.  Luckily, we already have a system in place where we record all the horses TPR (temperature, pulse, respiration) over a 5-day period so we know their average readings, from this we could tell if the horses were showing any signs of abnormality. 

The first signs are normally, spikes in temperatures, but we have had horses test positive that have constantly been asymptomatic! 

We treated all the horses as best we could, we looked at their individual nutritional requirements, when some had difficulty swallowing we made their feed much wetter, when some went off their feed, we encouraged them to eat, by adding innocent apple juice into their feed, and what a brilliant company innocent were, they sent us apple juice and a lovely card. 

We cleaned and treated the horses with wounds and administered any drugs required after veterinary consultation.  I personally took a lot of showers, wore a lot of different shower caps to the field, when not wanting to wash my hair twice a day and we kept at the biosecurity all the time. 

In the middle of all this, two of our horses went down with some form of toxicity, these were both strangles positive and the cause is still unknown, what I do know, is that we all fought really hard to keep them alive, the vets on call, and those not on call who came up their own time! Were amazing, and I hand grazed them every couple of hours all through the night over 2 nights, 3am in a dark field with a horse that is really sick but still thinks she has seen ghosts!  Is a bit of a moment!!!! 😉  The owners of all the horses were amazing, but the owners of these two, they trusted me, and I cannot thank them enough for their level of support.  It was decided that both horses would not go to hospital, that they would be nursed here and if the devastating decision needed to be made to be PTS, then I would be here with them, loving them to the end.  Fortunately, luckily, whatever you want to call it…. That did not happen, and both horses dug as deep as we did and made it out the other side.  I have to say this was not the worst part of the whole process, but in part, them living was the most rewarding.  The worst part is the mental torture, the nasty comments, the people who always think they know better when they are not in it, one particular phone call where I was berated by another professional! But overall, the joy of being nearly out the end of strangles, far outweighs any woes. 

We currently have 3 horses still positive that are isolated, (as we have now got most horses clear we can have horses in fields next to each other)! I could probably write a good few more pages about this, but to support this blog, there are loads of videos on our YouTube channel and Facebook page, the number of views has been incredible, and I am very humbled by all the amazing comments and support from complete strangers as well as friends.   Many of my owners have been amazing and I am so incredibly grateful to have such a great team of owners, staff and professionals around me; Hill Livery have a great team. 

Moving forwards, we’ve decided that all horses here will have the Dechra strangles vaccination and all horses moving in will be required to have it.  We have also introduced some other new protocols for new horses moving in.

In summary, it is the toughest of times, but I’ve been shown the most incredible amount of kindness, support and faith.  I urge all horse and yard owners to look at their procedures and protocols and have a think about how you would handle a situation like this, if you plan for it and it never happens that is brilliant.

Now we have a plan moving us forward to the new year and hope that 2026 is kind to us and we can continue with huge smiles, massive camaraderie, gorgeous pub, beach and Ashton court rides and put the last few months behind us. 

I hope you all have a great Autumn 2025 and thank you for your support.