Sarah Jandl-Butcher isn’t getting much sleep these days. She’s up in the middle of the night, checking the horses on her Cedar Creek Farm in Melancthon, just north of Shelburne, Ontario. She’s said she’s afraid of what may happen while her eyes are closed.
Jandl-Butcher has lived her life alongside horses, working for Thoroughbred breeding farms before opening Cedar Creek. She has managed horses through outbreaks of strangles and MRSA, but said she’s never seen anything like the strain of neurologic EHV-1 that has come to her farm. Ontario’s Office of the Chief Veterinarian released an update May 21 stating that three horses at a farm in Dufferin County “with an epidemiological link” to an EHV-1 outbreak at Woodbine had tested positive for the highly contagious disease.
“My blood pressure has gone up,” she said. “I’m afraid that if I do go to sleep I’m going to miss something. I’m checking the barn during the night.”
Since then, Jandl-Butcher said, all her horses have been tested three times. The first round of tests came back negative, but several horses subsequently developed symptoms characteristic of neurologic EHV-1. Three have died, and another five are at the Ontario Veterinary College’s hospital at the University of Guelph with similar symptoms. Jandl-Butcher said she is still awaiting test results from samples taken from her horses last week and on Monday and expressed frustration that results have been so slow in coming.
On Tuesday evening, Jandl-Butcher was making the drive back to Cedar Creek from the University of Guelph after hauling the fifth horse to the hospital. So far, the horses she has lost include a beloved children’s lesson horse, a 28-year-old retiree, and a boarded horse doted on by its owner.
Interestingly, Jandl-Butcher said no horses have been into her farm for roughly a month prior to the outbreak at Woodbine. She believes however that a trainer based at Woodbine may have brought the disease to the property when he visited Cedar Creek after caring for a sick horse at the track just after the outbreak at Woodbine began. Cedar Creek is home to Thoroughbred broodmares, yearlings, 2-year-olds and lay-up horses, as well as a small boarding and lesson operation.
As soon as she got word there may be a transfer of the disease from Woodbine, Jandl-Butcher divided Cedar Creek into three zones based on potential exposure, put out foot baths for boots, and began disinfecting everything she could. All her horses, including those that died, have been vaccinated for equine herpesvirus, but there isn’t a vaccine specifically for the neurologic strain of EHV-1. She turned horses out who could live outside round the clock to minimize their exposure to people and other horses that may have been exposed.
“Our test results all came back negative so I thought I was okay, but I still shut the farm down,” she said. “If I hadn’t I probably would have lost a lot more. We treated it as if we could still have it but didn’t know.”
Jandl-Butcher is begging her fellow horsemen to take the disease seriously and take all the biosecurity precautions they can — especially if they are going between barns of sick and healthy horses.
“They need to completely shower, change boots, and use boot wash and hand sanitizer,” she said. “These [sick] horses did not have contact with whatever horse the trainer touched. They were just in the barn with him.
“This strain is mind-blowing. When they go down, there is no helping them. I don’t want this to happen to anybody.”
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