Why cant you fix a horses broken leg?

Answer 1

In rare cases you can stabilize a horse's broken leg and allow the bone to heal. However in most cases, the most humane thing to do is euthanize the horse.

Broken legs in horses don't heal well primarily because horses stand on them for up to 23 hours out of every day - most horses sleep standing up the majority of the time through the use of locking tendons to keep their legs in place. When one leg is broken, the horse cannot put weight on that leg (it would crush, pulverize and destroy the bone), so the weight has to be transferred to the other three legs. Often, this results in problems in the other legs - laminitis, inflammation, additional bone fractures, sprained and strained tendons and ligaments, etc. Once two legs are damaged, the horse can no longer stand up, which results in severe gastrointestinal problems related to decreased mobility, as well as compartment syndrome in the dependent muscles.

I have seen this attempted once while I was in vet school - a very nice 6 year old Arab stallion shattered the proximal radius (the long shin bone in the front leg). The vets tried to piece the bone back together, but $10,000 and 3 months later the bone didn't heal and the horse was euthanized.

Answer 2

Horses are flight animals. Their survival depends on their ability to flee danger. A horse with a broken leg in the wild has little or no chance to survive and little or no chance to mend its broken leg because the limb cannot be immobilized and left unused the time for the bone to heal.

That being said, a horse with a broken leg does not necessarily need to be put down. As caring for a horse with a broken leg can be a very costly endeavor, it becomes, to a certain extent a financial question. Is the owner willing to pay for the care? Even then, the chances of recovery depend largely on the seriousness of the injury, the character of the horse itself, the skill of the veterinary surgeon handling the case and the onset of complications (laminitis for example).