What Was Killing Louisiana Horses? Mysterious Outbreak Led to Hunt for Clues
The Advocate
Jerome Bellard had no idea what was coming.
It was early afternoon on Dec. 3, and one of the workers at the Vermilion Parish horse farm Bellard manages had asked for a ride to town to get a six-pack.
As the pickup truck rolled down the driveway, the horses in the farm’s easternmost pasture, for whom the truck usually meant it was mealtime, started moving toward the feeding area.
All except for one.
A pregnant mare known as White 67 wasn’t moving. She was down, on her side, not far from the giant live oak tree that dominates the pasture.
When Bellard returned, White 67 was back on her feet and appeared normal. But within half an hour, the mare was down again.
Bellard, tall and broad with short gray hair, still wasn’t overly worried. He thought she might have colic, a catch-all term used to describe horses that appear to have some abdominal discomfort. Often, a short walk and a shot of a drug called banamine take care of the problem.
They got White 67 on her feet, walked her to the barn, gave her the shot and bathed her. But Bellard was still uneasy, so he loaded her in a trailer for the trip to a veterinarian in Vinton, about 100 miles away.
“I get halfway there, and I feel the trailer shake a little bit,” Bellard said. “She had laid down.”
By the time he got to Vinton, White 67 was unresponsive. She had to be dragged off the trailer.
The vets there told Bellard the symptoms appeared neurological but they were stumped as to the cause.
“The outlook is not good,” Bellard recalled them saying.
Photos: Horses at a Louisiana farm dropped dead. The cause was something rare, fast-acting.
The vets were able to get White 67 on her feet one more time, but she quickly went back down. She would live only a few more hours.
After an hour and a half at the vet, Bellard climbed back into the truck, stressed and at a loss.
Glancing at his phone, Bellard noticed he had missed calls from the farm.
A second horse was down.
Within 24 hours, three more horses at the farm would show signs of illness, suffering what appeared to be the same malady that had struck White 67.
And Bellard would soon find himself at the epicenter of an outbreak that would rock the horse community and be blamed for the deaths of more than 50 horses in four states.
THE HUNT FOR CLUES
Cox Stallion Station is a cluster of barns surrounded by small pastures on about 60 acres of flat southwest Louisiana land just east of Kaplan, about half an hour southwest of Lafayette.
The farm is a breeding facility for racing quarter horses, which are distinguished from their more famous thoroughbred cousins by the distances they race, usually around a quarter of a mile.
Stockier and more muscular than thoroughbreds, quarter horses were first bred in America for their versatility. Most horses in America are quarter horses, and they can range in price from a few thousand dollars for a horse sold to a recreational rider to more than $100,000 for a good racer.
Breeders like Cox collect semen from stallions to impregnate champion racing mares. The embryos are then taken from those mares and put into what is called a “recipient mare,” a surrogate mother, which will carry the foal to term.
White 67 was a recipient mare.
Bellard has been the farm manager at Cox since 2010 and has worked with horses for three decades. He has seen horses through countless illnesses. But for the first time, he was flummoxed.
“You suspect all those vaccination diseases,” such as rabies, encephalitis and West Nile, Bellard said. But the symptoms didn’t match up.
“We were crazy the first week, we were losing our minds,” Bellard said.
But they began gathering clues.
At first, it seemed like only the horses in one pasture -- one that fronts a road -- were getting sick. Paranoia crept in.
“We made ourselves believe people were poisoning our horses,” he said.
Farm staff started paying close attention to the people who passed down the lane that goes between some of the pastures, even taking video of some cars.
Bellard collected water from the troughs and sent it out for testing. They found nothing.
THE DISEASE DETECTIVES
When the second mare -- this one named She Can Dash Fast -- went down, Bellard put her in a trailer and headed to the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine in Baton Rouge, about 85 miles away.
“After about 30 miles, she laid down in the trailer too,” he said.
When Bellard arrived at LSU late that Saturday evening, he was met by Dr. Mustajab Mirza, a specialist in equine surgery who also handles most night and weekend emergency visits.
Mirza and the clinic staff were able to get the mare off the trailer, but she couldn’t stand.
Fearing some kind contagion, Mirza told Bellard to bring any future ones to LSU because they had an isolation unit.
Mirza also called Rose Baker, a School of Veterinary Medicine specialist in equine internal medicine. Baker, 39, has been at LSU since 2017 and has become the go-to vet for hard-to-diagnose cases.
Baker immediately grasped the severity of the situation.
“They couldn’t figure out how to put their legs under them and stand up,” she said. “For a horse to not be able to stand up is very unusual.”
They ordered tests to rule out more common illnesses like rabies, West Nile and equine encephalitis, but the LSU veterinarians’ speculation quickly centered on a specific culprit: botulism:
The toxin is secreted by the Clostridium botulinum bacterium. For humans, the botulism toxin is most commonly found in homemade canned foods improperly stored.
Botulism in horses is very rare. But it is fast-acting and often fatal. The symptoms include muscle tremors followed by a broader paralysis. Vets will often grab a horse’s tongue to test its strength. A weak tongue or the inability to swallow is a key indicator of botulism.
Two other LSU veterinarians were dispatched to the farm to look for potential vegetation in the pasture that could cause the horses’ neurological symptoms. They came up empty.
Meanwhile, horses kept going down. And some of them had never been in the pasture.
“We had a slew of horses come in from this farm,” Baker recalled. “Between Dec. 4 and 6, probably three horses came in.”
Then there was a pause for a few days. But beginning Dec. 10, another 17 horses fell ill. At the farm, Bellard and his staff had begun noticing muscle tremors in the infected horses before they went down. And when the vets examined them, they had weakened tongues.
But if the cause was botulism, that led to another mystery. Where was it coming from?
In Louisiana, cases of horse botulism in Louisiana almost always result from inadvertent contact with a carcass that has contaminated a feed source. For instance, a mouse gets into a water trough and drowns, or a bird is baled up in hay.
LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
While the veterinarians were treating horses, Bellard was back on the farm. And a chance conversation gave him his final break.
A friend in the horse industry from New Mexico called him to gossip on Saturday morning, a week after White 67 went down.
When she heard what he had been dealing with at the farm, she exclaimed.
“She says, ‘Oh my God, there’s a farm in New Mexico that’s having the same problem,” Bellard said.
That friend put Bellard in touch with Dr. Warren Franklin, the veterinarian who was treating several horses with neurological symptoms from a breeding operation near Ruidoso Downs, N. M.
Franklin suspected botulism, even though he had seen only a handful of cases in his 30 years of practice.
Horses on the New Mexico farm were fed two different types of feed. One of those was alfalfa cubes from a company in Colorado called Manzanola Feeds. The cubes, really just pressed pieces of alfalfa hay, are sold under the name Top of the Rockies.
Franklin asked Bellard what kinds of feed they were using at Cox.
Bellard was floored. When horses started falling sick, veterinarians initially suspected something in the pasture or in the hay. So he had started feeding them only the alfalfa cubes. Now, Franklin was telling him that his safe food was actually causing horses to get sick.
Bellard had hundreds of bags of Top of the Rockies Alfalfa cubes sitting in his barn. “We rushed out and pulled ‘em out of the troughs,” he said.
Workers cleaned every trough with bleach and tried to remove every trace of the cubes, he said.
FINDING A THERAPY
Even with the potential source identified, Bellard was under the gun to find treatment. There is an antitoxin, but it’s not widely available in Louisiana. And it’s not cheap. A single dose can often run near $1,000.
On Monday morning, nine days after White 67 first showed the signs of infection, Bellard found some from a supplier in New York, but flight delays meant it wouldn’t get to Kaplan until the next afternoon.
Bobby Cox, the Fort Worth-based businessman who owns the farm, eventually sent his own plane up to New York to get the antitoxin, Bellard said.
When the doses arrived Monday night, a team of five vets were waiting at the farm to begin administering the half-liter doses of plasma to the horses, a process that takes 30 minutes or more.
“We ran almost 90 plasmas that night,” Bellard said, noting they worked through the night. They even gave it to horses that hadn’t showed symptoms.
THE TOLL
To date, 20 horses at Cox Stallion Station have died, out of 28 that showed symptoms. At the farm in New Mexico, 31 horses showed symptoms of infection, and 23 died, Franklin said.
Nationwide an FDA spokesperson said that federal authorities were aware of approximately 98 horses that had been infected and at least 52 that had died.
On Dec. 16, Manzanola recalled certain lots of cubes, distributed across 10 states, saying in a social media post that they were potentially contaminated.
Through an attorney, the company declined to comment for this story.
Word of the outbreak and the cause has reverberated around the horse industry across the United States.
“In the equine world, I don’t think anybody’s seen anything like this,” Baker said.
For Bellard, that three weeks in December was the worst he’s ever had in more than three decades of working with horses.
“Going back to that Saturday afternoon, I dream about it,” he said.
Bellard knows at some level they were fortunate. If the botulism had started showing up a couple months later, when the barns are full of mares to be bred and recently born foals, it could have been worse.
“Had this happened in February or March, we would have lost 100 horses, not 20,” he said.
But in late January, Bellard was happy to be back to running almost normally.
In the foaling barn, where mares close to giving birth are kept, he gestured to a spindly-legged foal peeking out from one of the stalls.
Bellard didn’t expect it to stay timid for long.
“They’ll jump up pretty quick,” he laughed. “Within a few weeks, they’ll be trying to jump over the wall.”