A word about equine blindness
The most common form of equine blindness is
Equine Recurrent Uveitis.
We have witnessed so many cases of ERU, sadly.
Various things bring about uveitis, but once it happens, the question is. . .will you end up dealing with ERU and what was the cause.
First, your vet needs to determine if you have ulcerations due to trauma or from actual ERU. You stand a good chance of treating trauma ulcerations and saving an eye. In these cases, the other eye should not be at risk.
For us, if ERU is what we are seeing, which is “hypothesized to be a complex autoimmune disease influenced by both genetic and environmental factors,” we know blindness and pain typically in both eyes is what the horse has to look forward to, sadly. Experiments have had a little success for saving some vision, but usually, the horse pays a high price.
Most of the horses that come to us with ERU have suffered a lot with pain in both eyes. Most have already lost vision and have tremendous pressure and scarring in eyes. For us, the humane outcome is euthanasia.
When we have horses who are lucky the ulcerations are trauma and have full vision and no issue in the other eye, we can help!
Many years ago, we were involved in networking ERU cases before we knew better. The horses suffered for years in pain when the places that accepted them did not euthanize or remove eyes. We have watched others make very poor choices and wished we could intervene on behalf of the suffering horse.
The question becomes an ethical one in cases of ERU.
The horse is blind usually in both eyes, and it is painful. It reoccurs, thus the name. The episodes, no matter how frequent, hurt the horses so bad. Current management options we’ve seen don’t have great results, usually, though we hear innovations may be coming.
The affected horse will keep the eye from slightly to very squinted, it will drain and swell, they may blink more often.
The recurring flare ups cause the horse a significant amount of emotional pain, too. Impaired vision mixed with pain in the eyes for a prey animal is traumatic.
Many lay people do not realize how very painful this is for the horse. They think the horse is doing fine. But this isn’t the case. Imagine if you have scratched your cornea before (I know I have) and the pain you were in. . .except in a week, your injury heals.
Well, in horses with eye ulcerations, it keeps coming back and eventually, for some, actually never really stops.
People dislike and shrink from horses with an eye removed, but the horse breathes a sigh of relief.
If we have a horse with just one eye that keeps dealing with ulceration or has past trauma that clearly hurts (most damaged eyes hurt), we remove them.
A horrific pain is over for them.
Lettie, below, came to us with either an odd case of single eye ERU or Trauma induced ulcerations that kept happening. It seems
She had this for at least 6 years. Granted apart from some tearing and light squinting, some people wouldn’t have realized how much pain she was in. We knew she was though. The vet who did her surgery was so pleased that we did not care about the “look” and that we knew she was in pain and wanted the eye removed to make her comfortable.
Until seeing her after, the average person wouldn’t have realized how much pain that blind eye was causing her, but the difference was so evident in her after, even to those who may not have understood how she was suffering before. Her whole attitude completely changed.
If you have a personal horse with an equine blindness case in one eye and notice the tearing, swelling, and even faint squinting, please do not let the aesthetics prevent you from giving your horse this surgery.
If the veterinarian diagnosis identifies it in the problematic eye, do the horse the immense favor of staining the “good” eye to see if things have started there also.
If you own a horse that is able to stay at the property he knows, with a safe turn out situation with the horses and people he knows and an attitude that may adapt to full blindness, and your horse is dealing with ulcers in both eyes, please consider removal of the eyes and letting the horse live without pain.
People rationalize all kinds of things and ways to make letting horses cope in pain okay. In those cases, the horse loses.