When Bill Thompson decided to open a retirement home for horses in Missouri in 1991, he was expecting heaven on earth for both the horses and himself.

The longtime owner and publisher of Saddle & Bridle magazine in St. Louis was approaching retirement himself and planning to open Fieldstone Farm the following year in rural Elsberry, Mo.

Thompson envisioned lovely, lush pastures filled with happy older horses, who eventually would just lie down under a shady tree and die.

 

The reality has been much more challenging for Thompson, especially when it comes to chronic laminitis, which he deals with daily in the elderly horses and calls a “constant worry.”

Of his 24 current retirees, 10 have laminitis in their medical history. Six currently are heavily monitored and given corrective shoeing every five to six weeks to keep them comfortable.

Thompson is proving more than up to the challenge, and his success in getting laminitic horses back on their feet is being noticed.

Take Tre Awain Cullamor, a 24-year-old fullbred Connemara hunt horse owned by Marge Harwood of St. Louis. Cullamor moved to Fieldstone about four years ago, after being so foundered in his front feet that Harwood and Cullamor’s veterinarian had given up on him recovering.

He had been living in a stall with some turnout but was so sore he couldn’t move around much during that free time. He was wearing reverse shoes for support.

The cause of the laminitis was a mystery and not linked to any one thing, but he was overweight and had some hormone-related metabolic changes that may have led to the laminitis — what now would be considered a metabolic syndrome horse. At the time, the symptoms were attributed to Cushing’s disease, even though Cullamor lacked other indicators, such as a heavy coat; Cullamor was given Pergolide, but the Pergolide was not helping.

“Cullamor was really sick,” Harwood said. “He was quite far down in the dumps — not only off his feed, but his disposition was just shot.”

Moving Cullamor to the 60-acre retirement home was more about giving him a nice place to finish out his days than expecting a turnaround.

His lifelong veterinarian, Dr. Donald Walsh of Pacific, Mo., said he was skeptical of the move, given the horse’s condition and the fact that he was going to a new environment where he was going to be out on a lot of grass.

Two years later, Cullamor was so sound that Thompson took him for a ride. Today, the horse still gets around just fine, with hock problems in the hind legs being more of a hindrance than the front feet. He has refoundered since arriving at Fieldstone, but Thompson says, “He gets over it, and we go on.”

Harwood said Cullamor, a laid-back gelding by nature, is now happy, perky and the boss of his pasture.

“He looks so much better,” she said, and called the entire retirement home setting “really delightful” for him.

So what is Thompson’s secret?

The last thing one might expect is that all the horses are turned out on pasture 24 hours a day, have run-in sheds and are not pampered with extras such as knee-deep shavings. Thompson also gives the horses varying amounts of additional feed, ranging from Purina Equine Senior to Strategy to Horse Chow. Grass hay is added to their diets in the winter.

But the pastures are not lush (with the exception of one former corn field; the laminitic horses are barred from that one), and the retirees have a lot of room to exercise. And when they are fed grain, they are locked up in paddocks to make sure no one steals someone else’s food.

Thompson’s success at his latest horse venture is not a surprise.

William Hereford Thompson, 64, already had an impressive resume before he turned laminitis expert. The lifetime Saddlebred promoter became publisher of Saddle & Bridle magazine in 1967 and full owner in 1973. When he retired in 1992, he sold the magazine to his sons, Jeff and Chris, who are co-publishers; Bill currently serves as publisher emeritus.

Thompson doesn’t even seem to want credit for his laminitis success. He prefers instead to praise the instincts and skills of his farrier, Jim Rose. Thompson said, “If he retires, I’m going to have to go out of business.”

But dig deeper into Thompson’s past and one learns that he’s known the basics of fighting laminitis his whole life. Thompson grew up on a 20-acre horse farm in St. Louis County and was aware as a teen that if a horse got into the feed room, Thompson should take the horse to a pond and make it stand in icy cold water, after which the horse would be fine.

Today, the number one method veterinarians continue to recommend after a laminitis-causing incidence is to put the horse’s feet in ice water for as much time as possible.

Thompson uses a more crude form of that method from time to time in his feed paddocks, when he notices a horse is having trouble getting around. He runs water into the area, turning it into a bit of a mud bog. The horses seem to do better after a good, cold soak.

When asked for one piece of take-home advice for owners of laminitic horses, Thompson says, think thin.

“Obesity is the biggest problem,” he said. “You have to try to keep them all as thin as possible.”

But he finds the average horse owner, especially of retirees, is more worried about the opposite, and he’s had clients put tape measures around their horses to make sure they haven’t lost weight.

Thompson sees a big improvement in mobility once older horses have slimmed down.

“Since they have trouble getting up and down anyway, why make it harder?” he said.

Thompson’s retirees come from as far away as New Hampshire and Arizona, and he calls it a pleasurable job, even with the extra challenges of the horses’ chronic ailments and failing health.

He does go to bed at night worried about what he’ll find in the morning and wonders down the road what will happen when he’s not able to do this round-the-clock. He wistfully added, “I grew up taking care of horses. I can’t believe I’m still doing it.”

But after a trip in 2004 to a prestigious horse show in Louisville to visit old friends, Thompson says he couldn’t wait to get back to his new life — the retirement farm, laminitic horses and all.

Fieldstone Farm Foundation, a nonprofit, charitable organization, accepts tax-deductible donations to maintain the facility and add acreage for the retirees.