A strange thing happened at the barn last week and I'll admit, it had me concerned for a while.  You know when you were a kid and your mother used to say things like "If you keep pulling that face, you'll get stuck like that."  

 Well we were messing around with Annapolis and he started doing the Flehmen response. It didn't bother me at first because Star does it quite a bit, and we just laughed about it. 

But after a few minutes I realized he was still curling his lip and when I felt it, it seemed rigid, like he was having a muscle spasm.  

I walked him around a bit, checking his lip every minute or two.  There was no difference in it, and I started to panic.  Was he having a stroke?  What was going on?  My friend Dee was there with me and helped me hold myself together while I decided what I needed to do.

 Brody, the barn owner, was all the way up at the house and Annapolis would have tensed up even more if I'd tried to lead him up there (away from Star).  So I made the decision to let him out in the pasture for a while and keep an eye on him.  If it didn't ease up in 10 minutes or so I was going to call Dr. Beckham.

So I let him out in the pasture and he turned away from me and took off at pretty close to a full gallop to the far side of the field where Star and the other horses were.   After prancing around them, snaking his neck and shaking his head, Dee and I were both straining our eyes and asking each other, "Is he still doing the thing with his lip?"

In the end we couldn't be sure, so we hiked across the field with some treats to go and check on him.  Thankfully he was no longer doing it and his lip appeared to be normal. He wanted his treats.

 It left me wondering what on earth had happened though, and worried about whether it would happen again or not.

When Brody came down we told him what had happened and he said he'd watch for it happening again (it hasn't)

Has anyone else seen this happen for an extended time like that?

 

I have never experienced that but, I am glad you brought it up since I have one horse that thinks he has to do that every time he gets fed.

His gelded self been "making faces" all his life and is now 18.

Annapolis is up there in years pretty good.  My theory is possibly a muscle cramp because he got too zealous for his old age.  Once he got outside, started moving and focusing on his pasture mates, his face muscles relaxed and he went back to normal.

I know for my own self, now that I can't see 60 in the rear-view mirror anymore, that I have to be really careful how I make certain motions or my back, legs and hands will cramp up in a heartbeat.

I have experienced "tying up" in my upper and calves of my legs more than once if I was over heated and didn't get back on the 4-wheeler in exactly the right way.

 Still-in-all, it's something I would wonder and worry about, since I'm a fretter anyway.

I did a fast search on it but didn't turn up anything; that doesn't mean there isn't something out there talking about the lip freezing like that.  And yes, I was one of those kids whose mom told me my "face would freeze like that, if I kept it up" lol lol lol

Like WTW said, things get stickier as you age. I also saw something in the TV news last night about the relationship between the way you walk and dementia. Apparently, a slowing of your gait can indicate a slow down in other areas of the brain, hence the dementia. Maybe Annapolis's age is doing a horse version of the same thing humans do. Might be worth a talk to your vet, to find out what to look for if his brain is slowing down.

 Ouch - I've had those cramps in my calves (Charlie Horse, we called them) and they are painful as heck. 

I have a call in to the vet to ask if it's something she's seen before (she has a senior horse about the same age, so we always have a lot to talk about).