P.E.I. foal with rare deformity could still become a racehorse, says owner

jack benny the foal is only if a few years older, but his owners say he's already taking their stalls by storm. 

Benny was born with wry nose — a rare deformity that causes the nose and jaw to twist to one side. 

"He can really only breathe through the one nostril right now, but it doesn't seem to be keeping him down any," said Morgan Sheppard, a standardbred horse trainer and operator at Living the Dream Stables in Brackley, P.E.I. 

"He's a fighter through and through. He's kind of beaten all the odds that were stacked against him." 

Although Benny's condition is rare, a few other horses in the Maritimes have overcome the physical challenges of wry nose and gone on to be successful racehorses, said Sheppard.

"We're just going to take everything in stride," Sheppard said, noting that the ultimate goal is to see him race.

"That's the hope, that's the dream … anything less than that, we'll take that too." 

When Benny was born Thursday morning, Sheppard said the first and biggest concern was whether he'd be able to nurse — an important step for building up a young horse's immune system.

"Foals are basically born with no immune system, and the colostrum they get from their moms will help build up their immune system," she said, noting that Benny's immunoglobulin levels were very low initially. 

"It was nerve-racking for sure, because if he was to get sick, he wouldn't have had an immune system to fight that."

But Benny was a natural, and went right over to his mother and "started nursing as if he'd done it his whole life," she said.

More recent plasma tests have shown Benny's immunoglobulin levels are up.

"He's fighting and he wants to be here," she said. 

The long-term outcome for horses with wry nose differs from one horse to the next, said Shannon Kelley, a large animal veterinarian at the Charlottetown Veterinary Clinic who helped deliver Benny. 

"[It] depends on how severe it is and what kind of interventions are taken," she said. 

"Given they get an adequate amount of colostrum and they are able to breathe, they can live long, normal lives." 

For Benny, the plan is to let him grow and get a little stronger before any surgical intervention.

"There is a surgical procedure that can be done to improve the alignment in their jaw and kind of diminish some of those effects, like their ability to eat normally and have relatively normal wear of their teeth," she said.

The procedure would involve breaking Benny's upper jaw, harvesting a bone graft from his rib and using it as a bone implant to create more space in his nose, Kelley said. 

"After that, he would essentially just go back to living his life, growing, getting stronger and figuring out what he's capable of and seeing where he goes from there." 

While Benny's next steps aren't known, Sheppard said she hopes his story helps people understand the world of harness racing a bit better — especially the positive side of the sport and care that goes into it. 

"I think it's really nice for kind of people to be able to see this side of harness racing," she said. 

"See how much he's fighting to want his place here on the earth and how many people are kind of going around him and working around the clock to give him the best care possible."

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