Angel’s tail before and after getting several inches trimmed from it. Laminitis caused the tail to grow excessively.

In all the thousands of articles online about the effects of chronic laminitis, a topic that seems to get no coverage is excess tail growth.

At first, I didn’t even consider that a laminitis-related issue. But, I was talking to someone at the laminitis conference that I attended in 2007, and the tail thing just came up. She must have mentioned it, because I remember my surprised response being something on the order of, “Your horses, too!”

The more I thought about it in the following days, the more the excessive tail growth had to be laminitis, because Angel always had a lousy tail and suddenly the hair was growing maybe 18 inches a year. I’m guessing on that measurement, but every year at the first snowfall, I cut off at least a foot of the tail, and I also cut it back in the summer because she was always stepping on it. Same for Goldie and Stitches. In fact, Stitches’ tail was bitten off by a fellow horse when she was a 2-year-old, and I never could get it to grow beyond her hocks after that. Suddenly, after the laminitis started, it was dragging the ground.

I spent hours searching online trying to find any article on excessive tail growth, and I just keep getting how-to articles on growing a long horse tail or information on the plant horsetail.

I thought I had a lot of photos of this in my collection, but I’m afraid the pickings are slim. But, here is one set of photos of Angel’s tail before and after I trimmed it.