SCRATCHES, DRY HAIR, ‘ITCHIES’ AND MORE: For those deal­ing with any­thing *akin* to scratches, here is a great link! Now that the horses are TOTALLY in my over­see­ing of their care, I’m using a ver­sion of this (passed by my won­der­ful vet) to treat Sorcha’s dermatitis…which, by the way, is NOT scratches at all, nor mites. She has ouch­ies behind her knee area that she picks at all the time (kind of like me and my mos­quito bites lol) and just never allows them to heal com­pletely...

Add to that dry feather — and remem­ber it’s grow­ing back in with a ven­gence, so that itches too — and voilà, prime sce­nario for her itch­ing the hell out of her­self! I am using MTG as the deliv­er­ant instead of DMSO (also ok’d by the vet) since it’s the nec­es­sary sul­phur needed and helps oil the feath­ers and, at least for my horse, has no reac­tion or burn­ing with it…some horses do, mind you. But in 1 appli­ca­tion, I saw a dif­fer­ence. I mixed up the potion 1:1:1 as stated and applied to just the needed area (with gloves this time so I could really rub it in b/c I bite my cuti­cles and didn’t want to moosh it in there) and then used straight MTG on the rest of her feather…which I haven’t been able to do for a while now…There already is a marked dif­fer­ence in the stiff­ness and soft­ness of her feather. The ouchy areas that usu­ally get dry scabby are nice and pink healed. I am apply­ing every other day instead of daily while I was test­ing. I also am still using the sul­phur 8 braid spray stuff on the base of her tail area and down the cen­ter of her mane to keep her com­fort­able with all that hair. Really like that stuff and olther parts of the brand/line and was rec­om­mended by some­one on the Gypsy forums…

http://www.anvilmag.com/farrier/101f5.htm