Mystery Illness Claims Lives Of 100 Horses

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Ocala, FL - The 87-acre farm named EquiTransfer, is a place that rescues mares to become surrogate mothers. The deaths were a devastating loss for the owner, Francis Ramirez.

One by one, the mares suddenly experienced seizures, suffering spasms and twitching muscles, before they fell to the ground. Ramirez had the sad duty of euthanizing several of the horses.

Samples taken of the hay were sent to a toxicology lab while at the University of Florida Veterinary Medical Center, necropsies were performed on two of the horses.

Veterinarians in Marion County said they've never seen such a mass outbreak. They do believe at this point that it's not contagious and that the toxins came from the horses' food.

"My best guess is that it was botulism and that's probably the most common food contaminant," said Dr. Carol Clark, veterinarian.

One of the veterinarians said that it may have come from hay bales, explaining that when bales have been left out during wet weather, mold spores and bacteria will grow. Horses are very sensitive to these toxins.

Another possible source comes from what is called "haylage". Haylage is described as green, semi-fermented hay which is typically given to cattle because of its high protein content. Any suspect haylage was destroyed, even though it had been grown specifically for the farm's horses.

Other horse farmers admit that they do not feed haylage to their horses and when asked about it, Ramirez responded saying,

"They're fed multiple types of hay."

This loss will cost the Equitransfer farm's owners an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars.

(As a side note, the state of Florida only regulates processed animal feed and does not regulate hay or haylage.)