I was another brutally hot day in Maryland. Haze from the California wildfires stretched clear across the country that week, coloring the setting sun dark red. I stood with my horse Luciano in the growing dusk, hosing him off for the fourth time that day. His nostrils worked faster than I wanted to count, but I estimated that his respiration was upward of 50 breaths per minute. His skin was hot to the touch, but he only sweated in small patches behind his ears and around his nostrils.
I pictured the struggle that went on in his body each day. Foremost was PPID (pituitary pars intermedia dysfunction), a metabolic condition affecting the hypothalamus and pituitary glands that causes a whole host of problems, from abnormal hair growth to insulin resistance. Anhidrosis (no or abnormal sweating) can be a component of PPID, and in Luciano’s case the condition was severe enough to need targeted treatment.
Equine asthma, inflammation of his lower airways, was the latest in his string of diagnoses. The conditions were unlucky coincidences that worked together to make him miserable. Every
