I told you about the time I went up to pick up Bob from the trainer’s and he had put him in a stall that he’d just spread Quick Lime in to neutralize the ammonia and Bob promptly tried to eat some of it. Compaired to the regular dolomitic lime that they usually spread on pastures, quick lime is a fine powder and very caustic. They actually use it to sprinkle on decomposing carcases to kinda help “disolve” them. So needless to say, it was burning his mouth pretty bad. The trainer and I were just standing around talking and I noticed Bob had white powder all over his lips and was slobbering like crazy. That’s when we realized what he’d done so we got the hose and started washing his mouth out. He was fine, but it still turned his gums real red and I’ll bet it was pretty darned sore for a while. Troy said he’d been doing that to his stalls forever and had never had a horse try to eat any before. Leave it to BobTheBiter to be the first!
Bob tried to tase everything, such a little boy. The Co-Op guy told us it would not hur the horses but I felt much better after it rained some and they did not look like coke heads.
Dolomite lime just about killed me when I was a teen. I reached in to scoop some and took a big cloud in the face and I got so much in my lungs I couldn’t breathe. I ended up getting pneumonia from it.
The funny part was when mom called the ER to ask about it before I went in, at first they were treating it as a poison control issue, not a congestion issue. They were saying “she breathed what? Lime powder? Like the fruit? Like you make lemonade with? We don’t find anything to indicate that would be poisonous. “No - lime stone” - like they make sheet rock out of” “And how did she breathe that?” “She was putting it in a horse stall” “We’re not finding limestone in the poison database either”. “Did she eat it?”
Anyway, I remember the conversation because it was such a complete cluster_____.... They had no idea what it was. We just went in, my chest hurt so bad I felt like I was having a heart attack.