“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” William Jennings Bryan

Thursday, March 17, 2016

March 17, 2016




Last fall, Louie laid an egg. Well sort of. He passed an enterolith the size of a baseball. An enterolith is basically a stone made of minerals that forms when an indigestible object, such as a nail or piece of baling string, enters the intestines. The horse’s defense is to surround the object with minerals so that it can do no harm, similar to how an oyster creates a pearl around a grain of sand. Usually these are small and pass unnoticed. In other instances, they are not readily passed and the body continues to add layers and it grows larger and larger. If they grow large enough, an enterolith can easily block the intestines and cause colic, which can quickly become fatal.  Lou is lucky. Judging from the size of his enterolith, it probably had been growing in his intestines for many years, and is more than big enough to cause colic.  It would be interesting to have it sawed in half to see what’s inside, yet we are going to keep it intact as a reminder of Lou’s luck, and as conversation piece.